TIL: My childhood was a lie.

TL;DR: The Italian "translation" of the tech specs completely changed the labels.

Part of the experience of having been born before the age of the internet is that you often wondered about things that you had no easy way to find an answers for: "what's the name of that song in that commercial?", "how old is that actor?", "why have my car robot toys suddenly been rebranded under a different name?"

Of course now all of those questions can be answered by simply typing them on google, but there's a catch, after many years most of those questions remain forgotten, until somehow in some ways they resurface from your memory. So here's the story of how I recently remembered something that really bugged me as a child. You see I collected several transformers toys like, I presume, most of you, and back then each pack came with those "tech specs" that you can surely see in the image above. I religiously collected them and relied on them as some sort of bible to know all about my precious toys. But something really seemed off to me. Because, you see, according to those specs a seemingly nondescript micro robot was the highest ranked autobot in my collection. In other words I was supposed to play it as the leader of every other autobot I had, and that didn't really feel right.

"Why is this puny robot ranked so high?" That was my question that for many years remained unanswered.

So as you might have surmised from the image, I'm Italian and I had the Italian versions of the transformers. Something that I learned quite a long time ago is that all names were localized. What I didn't even suspect, until now, is that they blatantly mistranslated some of the tech specs. No, that would be putting it mildly, they completely slapped whatever label they wanted on the existing specs.

Because, as you can see, the specs themselves are exactly the same as the original, but the labels are almost all wrong.

The first one is correct, "forza" means "strength", no issues there.

The second one instead of "intelligence" reads "audacia" which translates into "boldness". What? How is that even different from "courage"? And why it replaces "intelligence"?

The third one is supposed to be "speed", but the Italian version says "resistenza" which translates into "endurance". Now this doesn't really make sense, because why would a heavy construction vehicle have an endurance of only 2?

The fourth is the one that should say "endurance", but it says "velocità" (speed) instead. Clearly they have swapped the third and the fourth for who knows what reason. Again why would a heavy construction vehicle have a speed of 7?

The fifth one should say "Rank", but instead it says "Intelligenza" (Intelligence). This was supposed to be the second spec not the fifth.

The sixth one says "coraggio" (courage) and that's the only one alongside strength that is actually correct.

The seventh says "abilità" (skill), but it should say "firepower" instead.

Finally the last one, the one that never felt right to me even back then, says "Grado" (Rank), but it was actually supposed to be "skill", which they somehow decided to move one line above.

So this is how an autobot that was supposed to have a mediocre Rank of 6 ended up having a Rank of 9, This is how I discovered that the local toy company lied to me and several other children of my generation.

By the way, the bio is also not really a translation, it's an entirely different text that more ore less conveys the original idea of someone who doesn't really like war.

But hey, at least... at least they didn't call him "Erector"...