Not the Magazine You’re Looking For

I was just playing Dead Island: Riptide, a zombie game which takes place on a tropical island, and in one section you have to travel through some tunnels dug by the Japanese in WWII. While there, I found this bunker labeled “雑誌”, which, while technically meaning “magazine” in English, more specifically and exclusively means the paper magazines people read. So unless this is supposed to be a room filled with old editions of TIME, the word they were looking for was “弾薬庫”, which means “magazine” in the sense of a storage depot for munitions. I suspect the developers flipped open the nearest Japanese dictionary and used the first entry they saw under “magazine”. Needless to say, I encourage people to always use a professional translator, no matter how small the job.

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