BODY: When Nintendo's overseas official X account posted about an upcoming title, eagle-eyed Japanese fans tapping the "translate post" button got a surprise: X's AI confidently informed them it was a Pokémon announcement. The only problem? The game in question had nothing to do with Pokémon at all.
The mistranslation quickly spread across Japanese social media, with users sharing side-by-side screenshots of the original English post and X's wildly inventive Japanese rendering. The AI appears to have hallucinated the Pokémon reference entirely, inserting franchise terminology where none existed in the source text. For a platform that increasingly nudges users toward its built-in translation feature, the slip is a conspicuous one.
This is far from the first time X's translation engine has stumbled in Japanese. Users have repeatedly flagged the feature for inventing names, swapping unrelated proper nouns, and occasionally reversing the meaning of sentences entirely. The Nintendo case stands out mainly because of how high-profile the source account is — and because gaming fans are particularly quick to spot franchise confusion.
Nintendo of America has not commented on the mistranslation, and the original English post remains unchanged. X, for its part, continues to roll out AI features under the Grok umbrella without addressing the long-running complaints about translation accuracy from non-English-speaking users.
The insider take
In Tokyo, X's translation quirks have become something of a running joke among Japanese gaming and anime communities, who have learned the hard way that the "翻訳" button is best treated as a rough hint rather than a reliable source. Japanese-language internet culture rewards precision — fan communities parse single katakana characters in title reveals — so an AI that casually swaps in "Pokémon" where none exists feels especially jarring. Many users have quietly returned to DeepL or browser-based tools for anything they actually need to understand, leaving X's native translation as more entertainment than utility.
Originally reported by AUTOMATON (Japanese).