"Special runs" or "one or two-offs" for certain music stores like this one are cool. Villager, didn't you used to have a blue OBG LP that was a special run?
On translating, it seems like "gari" has to do with the electrics of an instrument either the scratchiness of the pots or some sort of tone problem or lack of a problem when plugged into and amp as in "no gari" as opposed to "cracks" which I would think of as a much more serious "break" in the wood but generally seems to mean playing scratches, dings or weather cracking in the finish. The word "amp" in a description generally seems to actually mean "and" not 'amplifier' as I would think.
I have a couple of friends (one is American, the other European) here in LA who lived and worked in Japan as adults (I only lived there as a kid). They can read Japanese fairly well but still have trouble determining exactly what is meant. And I know quite a few other guys that are native Asians (including Japanese) that sometimes have the same difficultly particularly when it comes to descriptions of things.
An example of part of the problem is that "Les Paul" is an English word/phrase but Japanese guys still use it phonetically because like a jillion other of our words/phrases, there is no direct translation, but they still use it, so it comes out as "less pole" or "resporu" There's a lot of that and other odd translations kinda like the 'nun-death/Fernandes' one that was pointed out. Phrases can also appear to say "I" when they actually mean "you" because of (unfamiliar and peculiar to us) grammer construction. After a while you do get used to what they're trying to express though and it gets easier to understand.
The real killer is the "Japlish" that my friends use a lot, where I can understand about every 10th word or so or they split expressions (and even words) between Japanese and English. But when they talk fast, I might as well be at a Klingon convention. Another reason that the online translators don't work all that well is some of the characters are Chinese or Korean or not written just right (i.e., misspelled=not drawn correctly).
