FunPlus Phoenix pursues legal action against “malicious mistranslations” of players’ streams

Esports organization FunPlus Phoenix has begun legal procedures following malicious mistranslations of players' live-stream videos.

FPX will take action mostly against League of Legends fans, who are known to misconstrue statements by inaccurately translating them from Chinese to English. The organization states these unfortunate situations have “brought severe damage to the image and reputation of our players,” and will move forward using evidence to "safeguard the legal rights" of their players.

pic.twitter.com/wBGzji7LBE

— FunPlus PhoeniX (@FPX_Esports) October 21, 2020

The downsides of participating in internationally broadcasted interviews is trying to get an accurate translation of the messages exchanged. Unfortunately for FunPlus Pheonix players, League of Legends took advantage of this and maliciously mistranslated words to serve their self-interests. The main issue in this situation included several mistranslations of FPX Mid Laner Kim "Doinb'' Tae-sang's interview, which caused controversy and confusion amongst viewers.

Doinb mentioned on stream recently that his Facebook got completely flooded by angry Korean fans because of what he said about DRX.

Would be very shitty if it was because of videos and subtitles like these.

— LGD GEN Sher ʕ•̫͡•ʔ (@gzeebee) October 16, 2020

Part of the action that FPX has taken on these videos is to copyright strike them off of YouTube. Although this helped delete plenty of falsely-translated content, it also sets out to delete other content taken directly from the official team's YouTube channel. 

Doinb has found himself under-fire after poor translated comments were picked up by media outlets. (Picture: lolesports)

An FPX fan named Scoople who translated Doinb’s analysis of the recent Fnatic vs.Top Esports game also had their video striked off due to copyright infringement. However, the organization contacted Scoople and offered to bring him on as an official translator, to which he shared that he's "really grateful" for.

Additionally, Korizon founder and journalist Ashley Kang shared common scenarios of when videos inaccurately translated content relating to players. Unfortunately, fans may continue to translate interviews on their own, and it will be the team's job to track them down and file action against them. 

The following scenario may or may not happened:

Original quote: [Chat], player A is bad? If he is, how did he make it to worlds?

Subtitle: Player A is bad! How did he make it to worlds?

*rakes in views with a spicy title*

*deletes comments that point out the mistranslation*

— Ashley Kang #Worlds2020 (@AshleyKang) October 21, 2020

Now with FPX's new translator, there should be less issues involving misinterpretations between interviews. Although Scoople is currently on board, this doesn’t mean FPX will drop any legal action against the other users that have stirred up confusion amongst the FPX community.