>>27760187The Japanese language is written with a combination of borrowed Chinese characters (kanji) that carry specific meanings and syllabic characters (kana) that represent sounds but have no meaning in and of themselves. Kanji make it easy to distinguish between homophones (of which Japanese has an absolutely retarded number of for some reason).
Until gen 5 the text in Pokémon games was written exclusively in kana, so that kids who didn't know enough kanji could still read the text phonetically and rely on context to know what was being said. Move and ability names are still written in kana though, so Google translate has to basically guess which meaning of the phrase is meant. In this case it's reading せいしんりょく, the Japanese name of Inner Focus, as 性新緑 (sexual fresh green), when the intended meaning is 精神力 (force of will).
By the way, even specific kanji characters can have different meanings depending on context, which means even the correct kanji spelling can be mistranslated with hilarious results. For example 精神力 can also translate to
semen power.
