This Translation Is All Wrong Take a massively corrupted artifact... ...First re-translation... ...Second re-translation... The corruption is gone! Flames of the Heckforge Start with another massively corrupted artifact. Apply flames and you get: Free damage bonuses! That's right - for some reason Flames is turning negative stats (resistances?) into positive damage bonuses. But wait... if you re-translate it now... Back to being massively corrupted. Re-flaming does nothing at this point. Re-translating again removes the corruption. Finally: saving and reloading makes the game lose track of corruption. Flames does nothing and re-translating removes corruption after reloading.
Thank you for catching and documenting this. I've been noticing similar things with my most recent character. The bugginess of what I experienced wasn't nearly to the extent you described there, but then I didn't have nearly that much corruption, either. I was definitely seeing Marcus Brody remove corruption and even negative krongings to an extent that it didn't seem it could be just lucky pairings of mirrored power-ups and penalties. Enough to make me doubt my understanding of what This Translation Is All Wrong is supposed to do. Unfortunately, I never remembered to take a screen shot of the pre-Marcus version, so I couldn't really prove something funny was going on.
Not sure if this is a good place to post about it, but I had similar problems today when Kronging a Cyber Cone. The pop-up kept telling me that the enchants were good, but they were definitely adding negative stats to the item. It got to a point where I was getting consecutive negative enchants on the same item every time, no matter what I did. Don't know if it is somehow related to these issues or separate from them. I was using Archaelogy to get double enchants also.