← Scryfall FAQs / General Why do you use joke names for non-English preview cards?

When Scryfall enters non-English spoilers for a set, we usually put a joke name as a placeholder for the card. We previously tried to do our own name translation for those cards, but we stopped for several reasons:

  • A lot of people and companies use Scryfall data downstream. In the past, names we translated have been mistaken for the official name. We don’t want that to happen. The joke names are quoted and are much more obvious.
  • Because the Wizards of the Coast localization teams sometimes translate card names bluntly (and also English is nuanced and full of synonyms) putting the text of a localized card into Google Translate or even having a native speaker translate the card will give you a good idea what the name could be, but it probably won’t be the official English name.
  • It’s time-consuming to keep revising our approximate translation, and when you have hand-entered the 50th blurry JPEG spoiler this week into a database, the jokes help keep it interesting.

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