First, the Pixar thing was green pepper, not green beans: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-inside-out-has-different...
Second, the Pixar one is not "mere" translation; it is full localization because they changed the visual to match the "textual" change.
The Pokemon one is where the change was limited to the "text". The translator's heart might have been in the right place (it would depend on how integral to the story it is that the item is onigiri) but didn't have the authority to make the full breadth of changes needed for such adaptation to be successful.
4Kids was very well known to visually change the japanese shows they imported if they thought it was worth it, mostly in the context of censorship. For example, all guns and cigarettes where removed from One Piece, turned into toy guns and lollipops instead.
The most infamous example, however, has got to be Yu-Gi-Oh!. Yu-Gi-Oh started as a horror-ish manga about a trickster god forcing people to play assorted games and cursing their souls when they inevitably failed to defeat him. The game-of-the-week format eventually solidified into the characters playing one single game, Duel Monsters (the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG itself in the real world), and the horror-ish aspects faded away, although they still remained part of the show's aesthetic, based around Egyptian human sacrifices and oddly-card-game-obsessed ancient cults.
When the manga was adapted to the screen, it started directly with a softer tone[1], especially because the show was to be a vehicle for selling cards in the real world, not dissimilarly to Pokemon and MANY other anime from the era.
Nothing that happens in the show is particularly crude or shocking, it had that kind of soft edginess that fit well with its intended target audience (early teens). I imagine watching Bambi had to be much more traumatizing than anything in the show.
But that was still not enough for 4Kids, which had a pretty aggressive policy of no violence or death. Kind of problematic when the show's main shtick was "Comically evil villain puts our heroes in a contraption that will kill them if they don't win." (You can imagine the frequency these traps actually triggered neared zero).
To solve this, 4Kids invented the Shadow Realm. The show, thanks to its occultist theming, already had examples of people being cursed, or their souls being banished or captured. 4Kids solidified these vague elements into the shadow realm as a censorship scape-goat. Any reference to death was replaced with the shadow realm. Now, one might wonder why the censors thought that "hell-like dimension where your soul wanders aimlessly and/or gets tortured for eternity" was in any way less traumatizing than "you'll die", but I imagine it's because there was always the implication that people could be 'saved' from the shadow realm[2] by undoing the curse.
The Shadow Realm was a massive part of the western Yu-Gi-Oh mythos and even today it's a fairly common meme to say that somebody got "sent to the shadow realm", which makes it all funnier that it is not part of the original show.
A couple funny examples off the top of my head: - Yugi must win a match while his legs are shackled. Two circular saws, one for him and one for the enemy, are present in the arena. They near the two competitors as they lose Life Points, with the loser destined to have their legs cut off.
In the 4Kids adaptation, the saws are visually edited to be glowing blue, and it's stated they're made out of dark energy that will send anybody that touches it to the shadow realm.
- A group of our heroes fight a group of villains atop of a skyscraper with a glass roof. In the original version, the villains state that the roof has been boobytrapped so that the losing side will explode, plunging the losers to their death by splattening.
In the 4Kids version, the boobytrap remained, but the visuals were edited to add a dark mist under the glass, with the villains stating that there's a portal under the roof that will send anybody that touches it to the shadow realm. This is made funnier when the villains lose and they're shown to have had parachutes with them all along, and they are NOT edited out.
[1] Technically speaking, there was a previous adaptation that followed the manga more closely and got only one season, generally referred to as Season 0.
[2] It does eventually happen in the anime that the heroes go in an alternate dimension to save somebody's cursed soul. Obviously, this dimension was directly identified as the Shadow Realm in the localization.
Netflix also does something absurd with their subtitles. I was watching "The Empress" (which is set in the Austro-Hungarian Empire) with German language and English subtitles. I like listening to the real actors' voices, and learning the sounds and cadence of the language. So the characters speak in Italian for a while (subtitles say "[speaking in Italian]", and when they switch back to German the subtitles clarify.. "[in English]". The fuck, Netflix? Surely the viewer of this show understands they didn't speak in English in the Austro-Hungarian empire, so why write it's English? What the hell is Netflix even trying to achieve here? Seems robotic: "us = English speakers, therefore everyone's default must be English"?
It makes sense to "translate" locale cultural indicators in say Wall·E which was very location agnostic but not so much for say Turning red which is very culturally specific.
The localization of The Incredibles in Argentina was embarrassing, though someone must have thought it was a good idea. They used local voice actors popular at the time (though not so much today) with strong porteño (Buenos Aires') accents. They also referred to the streets with Argentinian names, e.g. "let's turn that corner of Corrientes Avenue!". The problem is that Corrientes Av is very typical of Buenos Aires, but nothing on screen looked anywhere close to it, so the whole thing was ridiculous and embarrassing, sort of like if the characters pretended they were in Tokyo and were Japanese.
What if they had gone the extra mile (maybe possible in the near future) and reskinned every character to look more Argentinian, and rethemed the city to look more like Buenos Aires, would I have been happier? Certainly not -- I want to see the original movie as intended, not some sanitized version designed to make me feel "at home" and not challenge me in the slightest.
(I watched the movie in English as well, mind you).
It did remind me of watching "The Beast" (La Bête)[0] in the original French with subtitles and I was then surprised when I saw the subtitles say "[In English]" and I was, "Oh, damn, the characters did actually switch to English".
For example, when Elisabeth is practicing several languages, each is subtitled "[in $language]", but when she switches back to German the subtitles readily explain... "[in English]". This confused the hell out of me!
My wife worked for a company that helped provide teaching content for schools throughout Brazil. They'd interview teachers all over the country and one of the complaints from teachers in isolated communities was that they had to use the same textbooks as other places in Brazil without any regard to their own situation.
They reported that many examples for starting math for kids featured things like "strawberries" or "apples", things the kids had never seen or maybe heard. So now they needed to abstract over what is a "fruit" and a "countable object" as well as whatever the example was trying to teach. Teachers reported less engagement and it was more work for them to adapt it to local relevance.
Try to teach kids about vegetables in the US midwest and use green beans and Bok Choy as an example, for instance. It doesn't make sense.
Lacking cultural context while reading translated texts is what made studying history finally interesting to me.