Gundam Sucks (11 Languages Edition) – Parody Tshirt

Nothing asserts dominance on the convention floor quite like this shirt. They’ll point, they’ll cry, they may cyclically send you random threatening emails! Whether you’ve seen it featured in “You’re Wrong & You Should Feel Bad!” or you came here from TikTok, this is the shirt you’ve been waiting for! Tell all your friends and keep telling them: Gundam Sucks. It’s an international message.

Languages presented from top to bottom, left to right: English, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, German, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Klingon, Elvish (Sindarin), Circular Gallifreyan.

Legal Notice:

This is NOT an authorized or licensed product. In the United States, Gundam is a registered trademark of BANDAI NAMCO FILMWORKS INC.  Its appearance in this product and related listing is consistent with the fair use or doctrine for trademarks as nominative fair use for the purposes of commentary and parody. It meets the criteria for tests set by the 2nd, 3rd, and 9th circuit appeals courts of the United States as unlikely to cause confusion for origin or affiliation with the trademark owner.

Notes From the Translation Team (11 Language Edition):

Whatever your thoughts on this type of humor it was important to us to get as good a product as possible once the decision was made to sell rather than just exhibit as a joke. The goal here was to avoid the pitfalls of a Google Translate job and give you as close to a colloquial equivalent as we could. While “sucks” has exact translations in several cases it lacks the connotation of the English use in most instances, so other phrases/words were used.  Spanish, German, Portuguese and French were simple in-house assignments for our multilingual team. But “Gundam,” in particular, posed a problem in some cases.

There’s no official translation for it in Arabic so we opted for a direct phonetic. Initially this was going to “sound” the same as in English, but our outside translator recommended lettering that, in standard Arabic, usually renders a “k” sound. Since it turns out that either regional pronunciation or differences in lettering cause the majority of the (not very large) Gundam fandom in Arabic speaking countries to spell it that way, we relented and ultimately went with the recommended change for the final version. Purists of the Egyptian dialect will have to forgive us.

For the purchasable edition it was important for us to up the nerd ante. If you weren’t aware Circular Gallifreyan tends to just be coded English and was pretty simple (the only exception being the letter “c” is always replaced with “k” in translation). For Klingon and Elvish, the rendering is entirely of our own making and superfans will just have to pardon any mess as we propose the first commercial translation of “Gundam” into these fictional languages.  In both cases we were limited to using or modifying existing consensus words.  Klingon required us to tap into the original crafting of the word “Gundam,” which the creators have said is a medley of Gun and Freedom.  Thinking about it fundamentally, we decided to have as the guiding phrase “state of the gun” for finding equivalencies in both languages.  For Klingon we opted for “HichDolth ‘up.”  Elvish we relied on the Sindarin chain of vocabulary, and ultimately in a world where the medieval substitutes for big tech we ended up relying on siege engines to give you “gaudsóma saur.”