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My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels
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I will not buy this trope description, it is scratched. A character thinks they can speak a foreign language, but fails comedically and says something entirely different than what was intended—often something completely nonsensical or deeply offensive. The Trope Namer is a sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus, where a Hungarian tourist in Britain is unwittingly using a dirty Hungarian-to-English phrasebook. He tries to use it while in a tobacconist's, where questions like "Can I please buy some matches?" are translated as "My hovercraft is full of eels." Hilarity Ensues. This typically has nothing to do with bad translations; the original speech was incorrect. For bad translations, see Either "World Domination", or Something About Bananas, "Blind Idiot" Translation, or Translation Train Wreck. However, if the language being spoken isn't the language of the work as a whole, there's usually a translation back so that the audience can see just how wrong the character's speech actually was. For example, Bob thinks he speaks French well. He speaks in French to a waiter, who looks at him oddly and says "Monsieur, I do not think that you really meant to say that there is a blue banana in your navel." Although this trope is Played for Laughs, rare serious examples are known to exist where Poor Communication Kills. Whether or not this is Truth in Television depends on the language. Examples include tonal languages such as Mandarin Chinese, specific "false friends" such as the Spanish word "embarazada" meaning "pregnant" and not "embarrassed" like an English speaker might assume, and words whose meaning change based on context, like the German word for cold being "kalt," but saying "Ich bin kalt" doesn't mean "I am cold," but "I am a cold-hearted person." But even then, mistakes are usually easy to sort out. If someone said "I like to eat pincakes" in English, you wouldn't assume that they are thinking of some sort of cake made from pins. Also happens sometimes with written language: some languages (such as Hungarian and Arabic) rely on diacritics to distinguish similar-looking words, and ideographic languages (such as Chinese and Japanese) have complicated characters whose meaning (and pronunciation) can completely change with the difference of a few strokes. A common explanation for the trope is that the character making the mistake has been taught something rude by a mischievous native speaker, playing on their ignorance to purposefully give an obscene translation for something reasonable. Badly-written phrase books like in the Trope Namer are also common, succeeded by software translators in more recent years. Early on Google Translate in particular had a reputation for this in Real Life (they’ve gotten better). A subtrope of Fun with Foreign Languages. Often used in conjunction with Eloquent in My Native Tongue. Also compare Either "World Domination", or Something About Bananas, which is about inept translations, Separated by a Common Language, in which similar problems happen because of differences in dialect, and Malaproper, a character who does this in their native language. Dinner Order Flub is this applied to restaurant settings. Not to be confused with I Need to Go Iron My Dog (which, though, is a totally legit result of My Hovercraft Is Full Of Eels if your first language is Russian: "to pet a dog" and "to iron a dog" sound identical in that language). Note: If you are interested in learning how to say that your hovercraft is full of eels in many languages, Omniglot has a useful compilation Also, according to Google Translate, the actual Hungarian for "Can I please buy some matches?" is "Kérhetek pár gyufát?", which when reversed, comes out in English as, much more sensibly, "Can I have some matches, please?" |
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The BBC comedy series Episodes contains a meta-example. The show's graphics department had prepared a dual Hebrew/English text for a gravestone, but the Hebrew text that was supposed to parallel the English phrase "dearly missed" instead claimed that the deceased had been "pickled at great expense." They had apparently used some kind of translation software that made two major errors: first, it translated "dearly" in the sense of "expensively," and second, it selected the Hebrew word for "missed" that can only be used in the sense of "to miss an opportunity" — a word which, when applied to any other noun, means instead "to pickle" or "to sour." The graphics department then compounded the error by reversing the text of the Hebrew rettel yb rettel. | |
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Sherlock: In Sherlock Special "The Abominable Bride", Watson attempts to communicate with Wilder, the concierge of The Diogenes Club, in sign language. After first telling Wilder that he is very ugly (instead of kind) he then tells him that he is glad that Wilder liked his potato (instead of story). | |
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In the Nancy Drew PC game The Captive Curse, Nancy and her boyfriend Ned are talking about how to make his life more interesting compared to hers (which is naturally filled with mysteries). We never find out what he said. | |
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In The Far Side, an alien misreads a dictionary and accidentally says "Take me to your stove." | |
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In A Good Day to Die Hard, John McClane takes a taxi in Russia and tries to speak Russian to the driver. With a look of complete disbelief on his face, the driver says he can speak English, and informs John that he just ordered a bag of hair. | |
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Tina of Other Space speaks Russian natively, but uses Translator Microbes to speak English most of the time. When they are deactivated in a power outage her English turns into this. | |
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In The Modern Parents in one issue of Viz, Malcolm, Cressida, and Tarquin visit Kaftanistan to persuade a local warlord to stop hunting endangered mountain goats. Malcolm has prepared a speech that is supposed to go along these lines: "You should be happy to let the mountain goats breed in peace," "You and your men should not upset the natural balance of the soil," or "If you are irresponsible now, your children will inherit a twisted and barren environment." However, after translating it into Kaftanistani, it comes out as: | |
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In one of the Charlie the Unicorn animations, the pink and the blue Unicorn suddenly start speaking Russian, literally saying "My hovercraft is full of eels." | |
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The second installment of the post-Soviet Russian Captain Pronin cartoons runs into this — it's mostly set in America, and has Pronin fighting the Mafia, and so we get such lines as "This is your money. Give me a smoking!" | |
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In Sluggy Freelance, Torg and his Portuguese-speaking alternative universe counterpart try to communicate using a translation book. At first, there's an inverted version where Torg interprets Portuguese-Torg's phrases as weird non sequiturs (without noticing anything odd about it). Then they actually try to speak each others' languages with the help of the book: | |
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From the Darkstalkers cartoon: "All hail the imperial... Pudding! There are lizards in my pants!" This is spoken by Anakaris, a resurrected pharaoh mummy, who even says it with an Irish accent as he ascends in to the sky. | |
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In A Certain Magical Index, there is a Running Gag of the English character Laura Stuart trying to speak Japanese, only for the others to point out that it is all wrong. This is because Motoharu Tsuchimikado taught her, and he enjoys screwing with people. | |
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A inversion in One Foot in the Grave: Victor is on holiday at a bed-and-breakfast, and has bought some spray to deal with all the insects around. While he is about to go into the bathroom, he meets two foreigners waiting outside who hesitantly tell him the bathroom is full of "midgets." He assumes they mean "midges" and confidently goes in to spray them. Needless to say, there actually are people with dwarfism in the bathroom, who don't appreciate him bursting in on them and proceed to hit him in the balls. | |
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On Coupling, in the episode "The Girl with Two Breasts," a scene where Jeff misunderstands Hebrew is played twice — the second time with the Hebrew in English, and Jeff's original English as incomprehensible gibberish. This reveals that Jeff has — in place of the girl's name — been repeating the Hebrew word for "breasts" ("Shadayim"). | |
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Jokingly played with on the third episode of Benson. The titular character is covering for the president of a fictional country (who happens to be in the hospital recovering from a poisoning attempt that morning.) A government official who thinks he's addressing the actual President tells Benson what he thinks is the saying for "Thank you very much." Benson, not knowing a lick of the real thing, makes it up on the spot that the way the guy just phrased it, "It was an insult to my mother." | |
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Angel: In "Harm's Way," Angel tries to communicate with a demon species that speaks in tongue-clicks, and ends up saying, "Be disemboweled." In another episode, Fred says something to Lorne in his native language that she thinks means "may your words please the gods." Lorne informs us that what she actually just said was "may you orally please the gods." |
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CHiPs had an American Sign Language variant: Ponch was telling the deaf parents of a woman that he would bring her home tonight in English, but what he's 'saying' in sign language causes the woman to say, bemusedly, "Ponch, you mixed up some signs. You told my parents that we are going necking and that you told my parents you'd bring me home tomorrow!" | |
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Bones: in the Season 8 episode "The Bod in the Pod" Iranian-born intern Arastoo Vasiri wrote a love poem in Farsi to Cam, who is now secretly dating Vasiri. Hodgins ran a few lines of the poem through a translation program, getting such lines as "You're my carburetor," "Bacon is silent. Listen to all that we scrub!" and, finally, a line that compares the moon to "a testicle in the firmament." In another episode, Angela is trying to put together a toy for her son, but the included instructions say things like "put to bumblebee make happy." The illustrations aren't any more helpful, so she winds up paying three times more to get an associate at the store to put it together for her. |
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In Rules of Engagement, Audrey believes herself to have a fair grasp of the Spanish language. She doesn't; in the episode "A Big Bust" she ends up soliciting donations for what she thinks is surgery to fix the bad knee of her Hispanic housekeeper. In reality it's breast augmentation surgery that results in the housekeeper having very large boobs (much to Jeff's delight). | |
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In The Monuments Men, Lt. James Granger (Matt Damon) speaks terrible French. | |
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In Criminal Case: City of Romance, Carrie tries to say "merci beaucoup" to a baker, but ends up saying "beau cul" instead, which means "nice butt". | |
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In Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, an early mission to capture a Russian soldier who speaks English has said soldier teaching one of his comrades an English phrase that (he claims) instills friendship among people: "I spent last night with your girlfriend." | |
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In Plan 7 of 9 from Outer Space, a Martian informs someone that their greeting of "Nanu-nanu" means "I wish to offer you employment in a Martian topless bar." | |
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One Achewood strip involves Ray attempting to learn German from pornography. The results are... interesting. | |
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Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls has Ouda, a member of the Wachati tribe serving as Ace's translator with the hostile Wachootoo. Unfortunately, he's very bad at it, translating "War Is Hell" to "I want war, so go to Hell!" | |
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Nicely played with on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia when Charlie is given a pill by some scientists to enhance his intellect and is soon shown speaking Chinese. It turns out the "pill" was just a placebo and the real experiment was to see what happens when a dimwit thinks he's become a genius. When Charlie protests he knows Chinese, the Asian scientist reveals that Charlie has been simply speaking pure gibberish the entire time and he was playing along. | |
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Johnny English Reborn: "You've met your matchstick!" | |
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The Simpsons In "Mr. Spritz Goes to Washington," when Krusty is running for Congress, he adresses a gathering of Hispanic voters in Spanish, only for Bumblebee Man to tell him that he just promised to vomit on their mother's grave. Krusty now understands why his maid left. In "Burns Verkaufen der Kraftwerk," the German Horst tries to arrange a private meeting with Homer but he keeps nervously refusing. Horst thinks that it's because his English is poor, but in reality it's because Homer doesn't want to be outed as a terrible employee. The season 24 episode "To Cur With Love," which aired just weeks before the 2012 US election, ended with a brief segment of Mr. Burns lecturing the viewers about what would happen if the republicans lost. Through it Smithers keeps telling him that everything he's saying is making it worse, so he tries to appeal to the Latino voters with the following: |
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Dominic Deegan: The main character's father Donovan is hilariously inept with the orcish language; while he presumably thinks he's speaking greetings and profound things, he's really spouting nonsense, such as "My landmass erupts with kittens." He also has a very fancy title: Later: Despite having fun at his expense, the orcs are very respectful of "Uncle Pinky." An orc has been introduced with the same problem, but speaking Callanian. Apparently he learned from Donovan. The orc in question was under the impression that the Callanian phrase for "hello" was "Be afraid! I am very dangerous and I am going to kill you!" As it turns out, Donovan's been faking it the whole time. Everyone is simply gobsmacked when he recites an orcish saying perfectly. And why has he been faking it for twenty years? |
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One episode of Full House includes Danny trying to impress some visiting relatives from Greece by speaking Greek. Papouli, his late wife's grandfather, replies, "You have a volcano in the kitchen?" | |
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Futari Ecchi has a scene wherein an American businessman's daughter mixes up her words and instead of complimenting the flavor of the crab being served, she was commenting on a certain portion of the male anatomy. | |
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The Kids in the Hall: Scott Thompson's idiot Canadian character walks into a shop where Dave Foley's shopkeep character speaks to him in perfect English. The catch is, he doesn't speak English and memorized those words phonetically, so when Scott asks a question, he can't answer, but continues reciting more unrelated English, which gets Scott angry. Eventually, the speech the shopkeep has memorized finishes with insults and the phrase, "Would you like to fight me?" | |
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An interesting non-vocal example happened on Dancing with the Stars. Supermodel Nyle DiMarco is deaf and relied on visual cues to do the dances. At one point he and his partner were dancing separately and she motioned him to walk over to her; it was supposed to be a flirty "come hither" gesture, but the exact motion she used (with all five fingers) is the ASL sign for "Get over here NOW!" causing Nyle to run to her, which briefly threw off their timing. They were able to play it off though, and viewers were none the wiser. | |
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The iCarly episode "iGo to Japan" had a Japanese speaker saying "Hello, I have a bladder infection" to the kids because he was using a Japanese-English English-Japanese dictionary. Subverted in that he was actually trying to communicate his bladder infection. | |
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Heroes' Japanese-language scenes provide several examples: Masi Oka once said that while filming a scene in the first season of with George Takei, Takei's line in Japanese was (paraphrasing) "I am proud of your progress (shinpo)" that Oka misheard as "I am proud of your dick (chinpo)." As Takei notes in the DVD commentary of one episode, every time Hiro says Nathan's name, it sounds rather like nē-san, which is Japanese for "big sister." |
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When Fang attempts to speak monkey while on an island of monkeys who look like her in Dave the Barbarian: | |
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In My Hero Academia: Vigilantes, Koichi aka The Skyscrawler is mobbed by the New York City press after helping a crashing plane make an emergency landing in the Hudson River. Being Japanese, he has no idea what anyone is saying as he's barraged with questions. In his panic, he mistakes a bunch of onlookers asking him to smash up Wall Street for the planted reporters he's supposed to make a scripted statement to, resulting in him saying that he'll do his best to smash up Wall Street. His bosses both Facepalm at the ensuing surge of bad press he just generated. | |
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Jessie: In "All The Knight Moves", Jessie (excited over the idea of Zuri winning the two of them a trip to Paris in a chess tournament) tries learning some French. When she tries to express her excitement over the tournament in the language, she gets this response: | |
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Stand Still, Stay Silent: A Finnish character with a few smatterings of Swedish tries to write "Be well" in a letter intended for a Swede. The phrase is "Voi hyvin" in Finnish, but "voi" also means "butter." He ends up writing that butter is good instead of wishing the letter's recipient well. | |
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In He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (2021), Duncan fancies himself as a linguist, but it turns out his research is very surface-level. While he has a passing understanding of Trollan, he gets in trouble twice in Avion when he learns their language is more contextual than he realized. | |
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From The Weekenders: Whenever Tish's mother tries to say an English phrase, it comes out with all similar-sounding words instead, leaving the three non-Tish protagonists to mull over what she meant before Tish "translates." | |
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M.I. High: In "The Wasp," Mr Flatley attempts to welcome a new deaf student to the school by signing "Hello and welcome to St. Hope's." According to Oscar, he actually asked Avril to go and buy some sausages. | |
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In the 1990s, there was an ad on the back of a magazine for Amazon.com's Spanish-language site, depicting the book cover "Cien anos de soledad" (Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude), illustrating the common Web 1.0 problem of websites that don't take accent marks seriously. | |
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While most extraterrestrials on the show speak perfect English (though sometimes in strange intonations, like the Mooninites or Austrian accents, like Oglethorpe the Plutonian), in Aqua Teen Hunger Force in the episode "Super Spore," a mouthless alien entity (later revealed to be named Travis of the Cosmos) uses a proboscis to hijack Shake's body to speak. His native language is bastardized Japanese (the only English word he says through Shake is "401k"), but in the episode he's learning English from tapes that Carl has. He then begins spouting phrases like "Shut up bitch! I need mustache ride for me lawyer." Frylock's Japanese isn't any better, however: | |
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Several instances in Community, particularly in the first season while the Study Group takes Spanish: In the "Pilot", when Jeff tries to convince Britta that he's a Spanish tutor to get closer to her, she asks him to say that in Spanish, leading to him doing this ("I sleep late Spanish. One more hour. Don't scratch my car"). What he says is actually comprehensible Spanish—specifically, phrases he would presumably have memorized so he could say them to Spanish-speaking hotel maids and valets. Britta knows that he's bullshitting her, but can't prove it because she doesn't speak Spanish. In "English as a Second Language", when Chang's replacement threatens to fail the Study group for walking out of their Spanish final to rescue Annie from Chang, Jeff and Britta respond in perfect Spanish, only for Pierce to do this ("Land of fire!"). A non-verbal example arises in "Analysis of Cork-Based Networking", when Abed forms a mutual attraction with a deaf girl. Initially not knowing sign language, when attempting to sign that he wished he did, he instead says "I detonated a mollusk." |
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There's Vimes' attempt at dwarfish from The Fifth Elephant. It nearly causes a diplomatic incident since the only word he knows for 'dwarf', having learned by picking up Ankh-Morpork 'street dwarfish', is the word for 'dwarf (indicating miscreant)'. He also calls himself "Overseer Vimes of the Look" and says "I am sure you are a dwarf of no convictions. Let us shake our business, dwarf (indicating miscreant)." Imagine what would happen if you addressed the chief of police as "punk." Yeah, like that, but with more axes. | |
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In one episode of a short-lived NBC sitcom Café Americain, set in France, the main character (played by Valerie Bertenelli) was finally given an ultimatum to learn the native language. Her initial attempts were a little less than stellar: an attempt to congratulate a newly engaged couple had her unintentionally claiming to be having an affair with the man; and one attempt to converse with her instructor/UST interest resulted in the memorable phrase "Cheese in my pants makes me happy. Don't you agree?" | |
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In Her Alibi, the Phil tries to speak to the Romanian murder suspect in her native language, only for her to inform him that he said his mother was an octopus. | |
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When discussing Twitchtalk in Paranoia, this trope is referenced by name. | |
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In Doonesbury's take on the USA for Africa "We Are the World" recording sessions, Stevie Wonder asks Quincy Jones if they can sing "milleloo shalanga" during the fills after the chorus, explaining that it's a Swahili phrase he once heard. Jones asks the Ethopian observer if it would be offensive to Ethiopians, and the observer says no, so they begin singing it. However the observer (outside the frame) adds "It's not a very nice thing to say about your own sister, though." This all actually happened up till the punchline. In reality, it was innocuous, but they chose not to sing it because Ethiopians don't speak Swahili (and several of the singers objected to having to learn foreign lyrics on short notice). |
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During a roleplaying game in The Gamers Live, Klepty (Cass's character) attempts to speak to some goblins in their native language. According to Gary's translations, he actually says, "Wow, aren't my pants shiny?" and "It itches down there." | |
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In the Harry Potter fanfic "The Dursley Witch," the Original Character protagonist, Dudley's sister, hisses at her brother in annoyance once. Harry proceeds to correct her pronunciation of Parseltongue: This is a usual gag in Harry Potter fanfics, with a character throwing random hisses and Harry pointing out what they said. |
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Scrubs: In a bizarre example, after noting that The Janitor seems afraid of JD's Latina friend Carla, JD wonders how he can use that to his advantage. He then daydreams about Carla standing up to the Janitor for him and telling him to stop picking on JD and to give JD a fruit smoothie everyday. The Janitor then asks in Spanish if JD wants strawberry or banana. Carla responds in Spanish with "Purple tree car with cheese." Janitor grabs Carla's face and rips it off to reveal JD dressed as Carla. JD immediately says "Feliz Navidad!" and runs away. The daydream ends with JD concluding he'll need to learn Spanish. "I have an Eiffel Tower in my pants." "What?" "GRAPEFRUIT!!" Turk says he learned a little bit of French, but most of it was intended to help him pick up girls. So the Eiffel Tower in his pants is... that, and the grapefruits are... those. At Carla and Turk's wedding, Carla's brother gave The Todd a pick-up line in Spanish: "Tengo herpes genetal," which means "I have genital herpes." (Though it should be written as genital).note Mucho herpes. Para tÃ. In"My Musical" Carla also told The Todd that the Spanish for "man meat" was "Pincho chiquito" (tiny penis). Eliott Reed (who is fluent in German) makes an intentional and dirty mistranslation to get revenge on Dr. Cox. Instead of telling his burly German speaking patient that "You have fluid on your lungs" — he says "Your wife has nice boobs." While making a gesture that he thinks is illustrating a pair of lungs. |
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In Wagons East!, after the wagon train accidentally winds up in the middle of a Sioux encampment, wagon master James Harlow attempts to communicate with them in sign language but Ben no longer trusts him and attempts it himself. The Sioux chieftain interrupts him after a minute to say in perfect English, that Ben just signed that he "wants to shave a buffalo's butt, and dance naked with a beaver". | |
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Ugly Betty has an episode where Betty (who has lived in America for her entire life) accompanies her father to visit her family in Mexico. The episode features a Running Gag where Betty tries to say something in Spanish and her father informs her that she just said something embarrassing: "You just said you ate your niece." "You just told them you're pregnant." The funniest part is that what she says are actual, fairly common mistakes among new Spanish speakers. | |
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In Star by Star, Ganner Rhysode, masquerading as a Yuuzhan Vong, gets "kanabar" (low-caste person) mixed up with "kane a bar" (dung of a rotting meat maggot). | |
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The Dresden Files: In Summer Knight, Harry Dresden attends a White Council meeting in which the official language is Latin. Unfortunately, Harry's Latin is very crappy, so when he tries to say "Sorry, Merlin. It's been a very long day. I meant to have my other robe" and "Please excuse my lateness and appearance," he actually says, respectively, "I am a sorry excuse Merlin, a sad long day held me. I need me a different laundress," and "Excuses to you for my being dressed and I also make lately." No, that's not a typo. Darn that Latin correspondence course. In a later book a White Court vampire is addressing the White Court in their official language, and is just as bad at it as Harry is at Latin. Thanks to assistance from a demon Harry understands it perfectly, so he gets to witness his opponent making an utter fool of himself. |
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Candorville: Lemont does this in...let's call it grunt-speak. | |
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Wedding Season: The white Nick's attempts at learning Hindi are disastrous, including telling Priya she is a "dead onion" and he is a "thin banana" at their wedding. | |
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In Deadpool 2, Deadpool claims to be unable to speak Cantonese, but says something from eighth-grade Spanish; "¿Dónde está la biblioteca?" which the subtitles correctly translate to "Where is the library?" However, Deadpool claims it's actually "I don't bargain, pumpkin-fucker." | |
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In "Bring Me The Head of Earthworm Jim," Jim, trying to get reservations at a fancy restaurant, claims to be the king of Spain and says some Spanish as proof. | |
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Garfield: The May 17, 2017 strip has Jon prove to Garfield that he can speak dog by barking at Odie. Garfield remarks that Jon just said "My elbow is a potato". In the April 24, 2019 strip, the chained dog tries to learn cat language, and demonstrates what he learned so far to Garfield. Garfield's response: "You just asked for directions to the pipe wrench." |
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While Harry Osborn is showing a female foreign exchange student around his campus in Spider-Man: The New Animated Series, as a sign of farewell, he says that "Until we meet again, your beauty will cough in my raincoat." | |
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Peggy from King of the Hill does this a few times in Spanish, like thinking "embarazada" (the Spanish word for "pregnant") is the Spanish word for "embarrassed," among others. The sad thing is, she's a substitute teacher who thinks her best subject is Spanish. It becomes a major plot point in "Lupé's Revenge". Peggy leads a class trip to Mexico and accidentally brings a Mexican girl home with her. When she brings the girl home, Peggy is arrested and charged with kidnapping. Hank finally allows Peggy to take the stand in her own defense, and her Spanish is so terrible that the court realizes it must have been a horrible misunderstanding. | |
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The Secret Saturdays: In "Into the Mouth of Darkness," Drew is less than impressed by Doc's grasp of Arabic as he attempts to apologize to a local for destroying his boat: | |
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Discworld: In novel Feet of Clay, Carrot is teaching Angua Dwarfish; when she tries to show it off to Cheery, she accidentally says "small delightful mining tool of a feminine nature." Carrot just thinks she's incorrect, because dwarves look the same genderwise. One of the earlier books explains this. In Interesting Times, Rincewind the Wizard is sent to the Counterweight Continent because he is the only one to understand the language — somewhat. The Counterweight Continent is a Discworld version of China, where most of the various languages are tonal, meaning the same syllable can mean several different things based on intonation. For example, the words for "wizard" and "blob of swallow's vomit" differ only by tone. The same thing happens with Mr. Saveloy, albeit to a slightly lesser extent: In Interesting Times, the narrator claims that a simple word like "aaargh" can, in a certain language from Klatch, mean "More boiling oil, please!" which can have interesting implications for those uttering it. A Running Gag in the same book has Rincewind use an intonation while screaming "aaargh" that translates it into the Howondaland phrase for "your wife is a big hippo." There's Vimes' attempt at dwarfish from The Fifth Elephant. It nearly causes a diplomatic incident since the only word he knows for 'dwarf', having learned by picking up Ankh-Morpork 'street dwarfish', is the word for 'dwarf (indicating miscreant)'. He also calls himself "Overseer Vimes of the Look" and says "I am sure you are a dwarf of no convictions. Let us shake our business, dwarf (indicating miscreant)." Imagine what would happen if you addressed the chief of police as "punk." Yeah, like that, but with more axes. Jingo mentions two Klatchian tribes who went to war over a translated word in a holy book, which meant either "god" or "man" — the difference in the original language is only one dot, and if the dot had been a little further to the left it would have been "licorice." Modelled on the Real Life theological disagreement over whether God and Jesus are homoousios (of the same substance) or homoiousios (of a similar substance). Because it was in Greek, and the disagreement was over an iota subscript, it gave us the phrase "not one iota (of difference)." In Monstrous Regiment, Vimes has a slight communication problem when, as a gesture of friendship towards Polly Perks and her regiment, he tries to say "I am a Borogravian" and instead claims to be a cherry pancake. An obvious reference to John F. Kennedy and "Ich bin ein Berliner!" (see Real Life, below). Ongoing mention is made of the restaurant "Mundane Meals." Its proprietor had asked Vimes for a word that meant "simple" and "down to earth" without saying what he wanted it for. |
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In Y: The Last Man, one of Alter's Israeli soldiers is held at gunpoint by 355. She pleads for her life by rattling off every English phrase she can remember. Things like, "how much does this cost." It might have helped if she dropped the gun, but that is beside the point. | |
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Total Drama Pahkitew Island: Chris attempts to give the season's teams an Awesome Mc Cool Name in Cree. One of the contestants, Sky, is actually Cree, and informs him that what he thought was "Soaring Eagles" and "Ferocious Tigers" is actually "Floating Salmon" and "Confused Bears". | |
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Referencing the Monty Python example, World of Warcraft has an "Orcish / Common Dictionary" and "Common / Orcish Dictionary" which translate "KEK" and "BUR" (LOL) as "An aggressively passionate mating call." | |
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In Corky Romano, Corky tries to talk to some Chinese gangsters and ends up saying nonsense like "hairy pencil." | |
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Polar Star (the sequel to Gorky Park). An American sailor who learns Esperanto as a hobby mentions a meeting his group organised between two famous practitioners of the language. "It took us five minutes to realise they couldn't understand what each other was saying. One's asking for the wine, the other's telling her the time." | |
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Sheldon's attempts to learn Mandarin in The Big Bang Theory: "Long live concrete?" "Oxen are in my bed! Many, many oxen!" and "Don't call the library. Show me your mucus!" or even this: "Your monkey sleeps inside me." The Chinese restaurant owner refers to Howard as the annoying little friend of theirs "who thinks he speak Mandarin," making this a likely case of being taught wrong. Of course, knowing Howard, he probably did this on purpose to screw with Sheldon. | |
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An episode of Welcome Back, Kotter reveals that Arnold Horshack's last name translates into "the cattle are dying." | |
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In The New Adventures of Invader Zim, Skoodge is said to have this problem with other languages. For example, he apparently once somehow turned a simple greeting in Vortian into "I would like to fill your pants with shrimp." | |
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An episode of The Suite Life of Zack & Cody involved a group of Japanese tourists coming to the Tipton hotel. Cody, who's learning Japanese, tries to ask them how the flight went. Instead he says " I have a hornet's nest in my pants." The tourists all run away, as Cody shrugs it off saying, "I guess it was bouncy." Later in that episode, Cody practices his Japanese by greeting a singer from Japan. It comes out as "My bellybutton grows watermelons." |
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Eternals: In Babylonia, Ikaris starts learning Babylonian, and Sersi is impressed. He tries to say, "You are very beautiful" to her, and she giggles when he accidentally says, "I am very beautiful". | |
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Early on in the Gameboy Color version of Magi-Nation, you are approached by one of the natives of the Moonlands who speaks like this. Evidently, all people in this world speak in perfect English, just with the meanings of all of their words mixed around. Through a sort of 'translation artifact', you are able to understand the natives perfectly. | |
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In Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022), Tails tries using the translator on his Miles Electric to communicate with the unruly patrons of a Siberian bar. But not only does the translator get their food order wrong, it also insults the waiter who brought it to them. This, combined with their disguises falling off, almost results in him and Sonic getting tossed into the fireplace. | |
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A real-life version referenced in Scandinavia and the World: According to the Danish writer, the Danish phrase "That's a major downer" can, if not pronounced carefully, come out as "That's the master negro." She had fun with this in a strip about Obama visiting Copenhagen. | |
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HK droids from Knights of the Old Republic do this intentionally when disguised as protocol droids. If we are to believe HK-47, the results are never pretty. There's a theory that HK-47 deliberately tries to disrupt talks to start a shoot-out. | |
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When Tails attempts to translate Yacker's language in Sonic Colors, it ends up invoking this trope. | |
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Not an intentional hovercrafting, but in The Wonder Years, Kevin Arnold is sitting in French class daydreaming about a girl he has a crush on. In the fantasy, his love interest spouts off a whole bunch of eloquent, romantic French to Kevin. To which he can only reply 'Do you want some butter?' | |
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Comes up a lot in I Woke Up As a Dungeon, Now What?: All spells are cast in High Druidic, but nobody actually speaks High Druidic, they simply memorize spells by rote. Taylor, however, has access to a translation effect that lets her hear what people are actually saying when they mispronounce their incantations. | |
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Tetris (2023): After securing the funding and (what he thinks are) the rights to start porting Tetris, Henk gathers his Japanese employees to announce, in Japanese, "we are big failures now!" Everyone reacts morosely until Akemi steps in and corrects Henk's pronunciation, and Henk repeats the announcement - "We are big PUBLISHERS now!" - to relieved cheers. | |
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Occurs on 3rd Rock from the Sun when Mary gives a talk to foreign visitors to the university. Since her editor decided it was easier to just pretend Mary's speech was perfect so she could go drinking, Mary ends up inviting the visitors to her "womanly place," and tells them that "there's room for everyone." | |
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Kenan & Kel had this with the date with Brianna, while Kel was trying to translate his order, the waiter got mad because Kel wanted "to park his truck on his mother's face." | |
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In an episode of The Real Husbands of Hollywood, Kevin Hart catches the eye of a little woman who flirts with him in Russian (the actress was born and raised in Kazan). Kevin tries to respond in kind, but it’s mostly gibberish, punctuated by the one Russian word he actually knows: vodka. | |
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In the Deptford Histories book The Alchymist's Cat, the evil alchemist Dr. Spittle teaches his pompous rival, Sir Francis Lingley, some French phrases so he can impress visiting French nobles. note Though Lingley often peppers his dialogue with French phrases, he doesn't speak the language well enough to hold a proper conversation with a native speaker. Unbeknownst to Lingley, he was in reality being taught vile insults. He ends up telling the Comte that his wife has the face of a barnacle goose and the figure of a butchered sow, and if his children take after her then they must be hideous. On top of that, he is tricked into asking King Charles II if he could sew a button onto his coat. This incident results in his falling from grace and he is Driven to Suicide. | |
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In The Saga of the Noble Dead, half-elf Leesil was never properly taught the Elvish language. His later attempts to learn it go poorly; the first time he actually tries speaking to an elf, he manages to turn a request for directions into an insult against the elf's mother. | |
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In Leave It to Beaver, Eddy Haskell teaches Beaver a Spanish sentence to say to his Hispanic friend. The sentence is, "Usted tiene una cara como puerco." Eddie claims it means "You're a swell guy;" in fact, it means "You have a face like a pig." Hilarity Ensues. | |
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Not Always Right: "Their Own Private Joke", where an American tourist in Spain mixes up the (admittedly similar-sounding) words for comb (peine), and penis (pene). In another case from their sister site, a French teacher tries to stump a student by speaking Russian only for the student to tell him he said he was a German warship. A woman believes herself fluent in French and orders food. What she actually says? "my son is a cardboard box."note mon fils est une caisse en carton |
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Played with in Cobra Bargain by Timothy Zahn when Jin is tutoring her younger sister in speaking Troft. According to Jin's Internal Monologue the potential mistake is actually fairly innocuous and she's playing it up to hold Cari's interest. | |
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In an episode of Suddenly Susan, Vicky demands that Luis teach her just enough Spanish to pick up Latin men. He teaches her to say that she would like to share her STDs and that she hasn't bathed in years. | |
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Jingo mentions two Klatchian tribes who went to war over a translated word in a holy book, which meant either "god" or "man" — the difference in the original language is only one dot, and if the dot had been a little further to the left it would have been "licorice." Modelled on the Real Life theological disagreement over whether God and Jesus are homoousios (of the same substance) or homoiousios (of a similar substance). Because it was in Greek, and the disagreement was over an iota subscript, it gave us the phrase "not one iota (of difference)." | |
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Batman Eternal: While investigating in Brazil, Red Hood admits that his Portuguese is rusty and that he might have just called the boy he was questioning a small horse. He had, but he managed to get the gist of his question across. | |
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Rush Hour 2: Thanks to his poor poor Cantonese, James Carter invites two girls to get naked and sacrifice a small goat instead of having a drink. He also tells the entire triad bar to take out their Samurai swords and shave his butt. Played with every which way. Det. Carter isn't speaking gibberish, but perfect idiomatic Cantonese. It's just that what he's saying is completely unrelated to what he means! ("Sit down, sit down! Everyone, pick up your swords, shave me. I want Tan. Go home, go sleep! Right now!") The heavy implication is that Carter bought a joke phrasebook and got tricked —- the exact same plot as the "Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook" sketch! Jackie Chan's English isn't too great to begin with. This explains some of the what-did-I-say looks he gets in the Hilarious Outtakes when the crew starts laughing after he flubs a line. The Rush Hour series director Brett Ratner also enjoys feeding him dirty English phrases and having him innocently repeat them later. |
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In Things Fall Apart, the white colonists hire an African translator to speak to Okonkwo's tribe, but because he speaks a different dialect than the tribe, every time he says "myself," Okonkwo's tribe hears it as "my buttocks." "My Buttocks" becomes the translator's nickname among the tribesmen. | |
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The Pokémon Squad: When Barney's Japanese cousin visits him in the episode "B�nī to Tomodachi", he tries to learn Japanese in order to talk to him. Naturally, due to using Google Translate and Yahoo Answers to learn, this backfires spectacularly. | |
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Red Dwarf: Arnold Rimmer's Esperanto: "Could you send for the hall porter, there appears to be a frog in my bidet." In the episode "Kryten," Rimmer attempts to speak Esperanto to Kryten and act aloof. He does not understand when Kryten replies, in Esperanto, "You speak Esperanto, Captain Rimmer?" |
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A deleted scene in Black Panther (2018) has Agent Ross offering T'Challa some parting words of encouragement in Wakanda's native language. Unfortunately, it comes out as "Good luck and many shoelaces." | |
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In one episode of James Bond Jr., the snotty rich kid takes a girl to a restaurant and orders a meal in French. On his first attempt he orders a live lobster. When the focus returns to him after cutting to Bond's adventures for a while, he's finally managed to order something edible in French — a cheese sandwich. | |
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In Dreams Made Flesh by Anne Bishop, Daemon wants to impress Jaenelle by telling her how much she means to him in the old tongue. He plans to say this one phrase he has taught himself in a very intimate situation, but during a faked public argument, he utters it as it's the only one he knows that their listeners won't be able to understand. Lucky for him he did that then, as what he was really saying was: "I eat cow brains." | |
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In Phenomenon, a friend of George Malley named Nate asks him to teach him some Portuguese so he can hire a (beautiful) Brazilian lady as his maid. Malley uses a tape recorder to give English and Portuguese "translations" for sentences like, "Can you start on Monday?" But the Portuguese sentences actually mean "You have beautiful eyes," and so on. At the end of the movie, Nate and the Brazilian lady are having a baby. | |
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A variation occurs in The Saddle Club series while Lisa and her family are on vacation in Italy. Lisa is given a cot with a broken wheel and tries to explain it to the front desk staff, but even with her English-to-Italian dictionary, the closest she can manage is "the wheel on top of my bed is broken." In this case she knows that it's not quite right, but she decides to use it anyway in hopes that they'll understand what she's trying to get at. Fortunately, they do. | |
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This happens to Kagura in Azumanga Daioh. Upon seeing a foreign tourist struggling with his luggage, she decides to go help him. He's quite shocked to see this girl suddenly yell "Help! Help me!" at the top of her lungs when trying to talk to him. She eventually does get her intended message across, but when the foreigner thanks her, all she can come up with in response is "Yay!" accompanied by a thumbs up. | |
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Zipi y Zape: In Robinsones Zapatilla, with the entire family taking part in a Survivor-like reality show, Pantuflo tries to communicate with a savage tribe. It doesn't end well. | |
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The Powerpuff Girls (1998): Near the end of "Stray Bullet", Blossom and Buttercup's attempt at speaking Squirrel ends up gibberish: | |
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The mom from Eek! The Cat is often shown repeating absurd phrases from language learning tapes. | |
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Grrl Power has Innocent Aliens come to Earth to tour, using a GlibGlorb to English translator that even name drops this trope. Their spoken English, while somewhat lacking in full, is nowhere near as bad. | |
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New Tricks: Gerry tries to impress a British Sign Language interpreter with the Sign Language he learned in childhood so he could communicate with his deaf cousin. It doesn't work and he gets "Can I dig up my Elephant with you?" as a result. | |
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In the Harry Potter fanfic "How to Say Open," Ron stumbles across this trope while trying to say "open" in Parseltongue, to Harry's great amusement. | |
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In one Something*Positive strip during Gwen Stefani's height of fame, after citing her cynical usage of Japanese fashion and girls, the characters speculated that the Harajuku girls were teaching her how to say she has a vile venereal disease in the guise of how to order food in Japanese as payback. | |
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In the second Symphony of Ages novel, Rhapsody's love interest tries to flirt with her in her native tongue. His attempt to compliment her behind translates to "You have the most lovely muffins." She never lets him live it down. | |
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In one episode of Gilligan's Island, during one of the castaways' many encounters with natives, Gilligan attempted to speak to one by spouting gibberish. Unfortunately, it resulted in the native chasing him with a knife. | |
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There's an episode of What's with Andy? where Andy pretends to be his cousin from Quebec. In order to prove it, Lori asks him to say "You just won the Stanley Cup" in French; instead, he says "Your ears are as big as the Stanley Cup." | |
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In The Gentlemen, Fletcher has a transcript of a lipread conversation in Cantonese involving one speaker who is not fluent in the language, that has then been translated into English. The results are unusual at times, including Matthew apparently saying that he does not want anything to "stroke his mouse fur." | |
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One short in Lucky Star had Kagami talking about Taifuu Ikka (ikka = kanji for one and 'pass over') which refers to the calm after a typhoon has passed. Konata starts talking about the "Typhoon family" to which Kagami replies "Are you serious?" Ikka also can mean "family" if a different kanji is used. Tsukasa, of course, doesn't get why Konata's statement was silly. In another example, the girls talk about something fairly mundane, then the word "ichigo" falls. Ichigo can also mean "strawberry," prompting Tsukasa to request some, confusing the others in the process. |
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In Interesting Times, the narrator claims that a simple word like "aaargh" can, in a certain language from Klatch, mean "More boiling oil, please!" which can have interesting implications for those uttering it. | |
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Murdock may be The A-Team's resident Omniglot, but his Italian isn't too great. Although the English-speaking mooks around him don't know any better and it helps his disguise, it culminates in him asking two men to have his baby. | |
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In Monstrous Regiment, Vimes has a slight communication problem when, as a gesture of friendship towards Polly Perks and her regiment, he tries to say "I am a Borogravian" and instead claims to be a cherry pancake. An obvious reference to John F. Kennedy and "Ich bin ein Berliner!" (see Real Life, below). | |
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An accidental transaction in Sign language happened in a sketch on The State. A waiter brought a year's supply of radishes in a wheelbarrow. | |
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In an episode of Pinky and the Brain, Brain tries to take over the world with an army of sea lions since he learned their language. Pinky tries speaking it too, but his phrases translate to, "Fetch me a big clown hat," a ghost story, "There's a school of overweight fish swimming near by" and "I'm a big billy goat so you'd better beat it sister." | |
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On I Survived A Japanese Game Show, one contestant's attempt at pronouncing "fuitte mo ii desu ka?" ("May I wipe it?") was subtitled "But, the well is it Switzerland?"note The subtitler appears to have interpreted it as "demo ido suissu ka?" but his pronunciation was closer to "te mo idu suissu ka" which would at best translate to "Are hands also (gibberish) Switzerland?" — nothing in the entire Japanese language sounds anything remotely like "idu." | |
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In the opening of Pulp Fiction, Ringo A.K.A Pumpkin notably calls for the "garçon" to bring him more coffee, believing that it's the French word for waiter or server, and his waitress immediately explains that "garçon" is French for "boy."note The waitress doesn't stick around long enough to explain that "garçon" can be used to refer to male waiters. | |
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The title of The Poisonwood Bible comes from an example. Missionary Daniel Price tried to say "Jesus is precious" in the local language, but it came out as "Jesus is poisonwood." | |
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Pokémon Vietnamese Crystal managed a truly impressive version of this trope, by hastily bootlegging a Japanese game into English. Among other things, the translator was under the (loosely correct) impression that "fuck" means "put in"; every time the protagonist puts anything in their bag, the results are M-rated. | |
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George of the Jungle: Lyle uses a phrasebook to attempt to communicate with his native porters in the African jungle. Apparently the makers of the Hungarian phrasebook from the original sketch also made a Swahili one. It turns out the natives understand English just fine. They're just messing with Lyle because he's a jerk. | |
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The Legend of Miraculous: When Zelda tries howling at the moon, (while playing Truth or Dare), Bleddyn the wolf Kwami translates it as something about rabbits in trees and hunting berries. When Sheikan Wolf howls back, Impa later tells him that he unwittingly said "Come and ravage me, my love". | |
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On Naturally, Sadie, Magaret runs a Greek newspaper story about Rain through an internet translator. The page she gets back is entirely My Hovercraft Is Full Of Eels. | |
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In The Simpsons comic issue where Bart, Milhouse and Krusty go to Paris, Milhouse tries to talk to a man running a ticket office at a theatre, calling upon the lessons from 'Troy McClure's Learn French Toot Sweet While You Sleep' he listened to on the plane before dozing off. Bart, who has experience with the French language, manages to clear things up (as it happens, the man speaks English). | |
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In Bloom County, Oliver and Milo hack into Pravda and attempt to change the headline to "Gorbachev preaches disarmament! Total! Unilateral!" Somehow, the altered headline ends up reading "Gorbachev sings tractors! Turnip! Buttocks!" | |
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For some reason, Kagura in one episode of Gintama feels the need to say "help me!" in English, but since her pronunciation is off, it starts as "health me!" and ends up as "herpes me!" and "Pulp Fiction!" | |
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In an episode of Garfield and Friends, Jon tries to order in French and gets served a pair of soft boiled athletic shoes. In another episode he ends up ordering the name of the chef. Both times he has to deal with French Jerk waiters. | |
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In Machete Kills, the shape shifting assassin El Chameleon pretends to be a friendly trucker and picks Machete up. The two have a conversation in Spanish, and eventually, the assassin messes up and says, "I like your cream." When Machete gets confused, he tries again and says, "I like your balloon." and then "I like your meat." The assassin then gets fed up and pulls a gun on Machete. | |
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In Gung Ho a secretary for the Japanese auto manufacturer tells Michael Keaton's character that her boss is "between a rock and a hard-on." He rushes in while jokingly saying, "I gotta see this." | |
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In the second book of the Nursery Crime series, The Fourth Bear, Mary Mary's attempts at speaking binary to Ashley's parents turn out to be this, once turning a toast into something that Abigail's mother would never have done, and especially not to herself, and another time turning Abigail's name into something about how Mary's prawns have asthma. | |
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In the novel Outbound Flight, a human character tries to learn the Chiss language, with limited success. At one point, he gives his profession as "fishing boat" (he meant "merchant trader"), but for good reason: he physically can't pronounce the distinction between the two words. Thrawn, on the other hand, has no trouble picking up Basic while trying to teach that main character. | |
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The Onion: "Area Man unsure if Southerner is looking for 'Pawn Shop' or 'Porn Shop.'" On Fox News, Niel Cavuto made that mistake completely seriously. | |
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In Scooby-Doo! and the Monster of Mexico, Fred's Spanish speaking leaves something to be desired, though he usually gets most words right. Unfortunately, the few he gets wrong are enough to turn the sentence into gibberish (e.g., "Thank you for your wise words of ostrich."). Ironically, he's much more well-versed in Spanish grammar, as he manages to figure out a major clue from a threat written in Spanish containing an error a native wouldn't have made, meaning that their culprit likely doesn't speak Spanish. | |
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Murdoch Mysteries: Detective Watts can apparently say "My postilion has been struck by lightning" in Portuguese, and apparently considers this useful knowledge. | |
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Bruce Banner, in The Incredible Hulk (2008), cautions some native speakers in Brazil: "You wouldn't like me when I'm... hungry." Ironically, in Portuguese, irritado (angry) and com fome (with hunger) are not at all similar, while in English, "angry" and "hungry" are fairly confusable. However, assuming there was someone who taught him the native language, Bruce could have asked this person what the translation of the word 'Angry' was and his tutor may have just mixed up 'Angry' with 'Hungry' and therefore provided him with that translation instead. | |
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In Coronation Street Ken Barlow is trying to teach the dim Raquel to speak French. She tells him that she already knows how to introduce herself, having been taught by a former boyfriend, and continues: "Bonjour, Ken. Je m'appelle Raquel. Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?" Which means of course "Hello, Ken. My name is Raquel. Would you like to go to bed with me this evening?" Interestingly, no subtitles were displayed on screen, meaning that any viewers who didn't speak French (or recognize the phrase) would not have understood why Ken got that pained expression on his face... | |
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M*A*S*H: This happens to Hawkeye when trying to speak French in "In Love and War." There's the famous instance in which Frank Burns, while holding an auction, tries to wish the Korean crowd "peace and prosperity." In response, a man asks, "You wish us all a prostitute?" From another episode: Hawkeye is screaming at a Korean farmer who was trying to work a rice field which had been mined, which ends up injuring his daughter. In "The Chosen People," Hawkeye tries to say, "Your presence is welcome in our camp," to Korean officer Sam Pak, but Pak tells him he actually said, "Your uncle has gas from eating cabbage." Hawkeye tries to say something else in Korean and Pak responds with, "I'm sorry to hear that. Your uncle with the gas is now pregnant." In the episode "Radar's Report," Father Mulcahy is attempting to calm a wounded North Korean. Radar's voiceover tells us he meant to say "peace and happiness" but was really saying "Your daughter's pregnancy brings much joy to our village." In "Dear Sigmund," Klinger claims to have been hit in the head with a chopper blade and only able to speak in Arabic. Via subtitles, he tells Col. Potter things like, "My olive has no pit and there is no yolk in my egg" and "Grandfather, may your pomegranates grow as big as the Queen's fanny." An unusual example in that it's intentional; Klinger is fluent in Arabic (in fact it's almost certainly his first language, given that his mother doesn't speak English) and is purposefully stringing together sentences of this type to reinforce the idea that he's delirious from a head injury. |
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Monk: In "Mr. Monk Falls in Love," as pictured above, Monk and Natalie are looking for Leyla Zlatavich's mother in a largely non-English-speaking neighborhood. They try to say something like, "Have you seen this woman?" in the Zemenian language, with Monk using a translator book to help out. However, when he does speak that language, the on-screen subtitles reveal that he's asking, "Have you seen the sad stick?" And he doesn't understand why no one gives him an answer. In the Tie-In Novel Mr. Monk and the Dirty Cop, Randy vomits in front of a Japanese tour group and says to them something that he thinks is Japanese for an apology. The detective riding with him, whose wife is Japanese, informs him that he just said, "Stop groping my breasts and prepare to die." In one of her blog entries on USANetwork.com, Natalie describes herself as stumbling to use the Greek language when she was an exchange student (the entry itself is dated to coincide with "Mr. Monk and the Naked Man"), as marked here: |
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Veep: In the Season 2 episode when the Vice President and her entourage visit Finland, Gary keeps introducing himself to people in Finnish as Selina's "bagman." Except it turns out that he's actually calling himself something vaguely like "man bag" — in other words, a scrotum. He's not happy when he's told this. | |
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Tsunami from Wings of Fire: The Lost Heir sees another SeaWing dragon for the first time. But since they're underwater, she flashes her stripes to communicate with him. But what she ends up saying by accident is "Hey, sparkling teeth, I totally love three of your claws but not the others, and I wish your nose was a herring so I can eat it, and also your wings sound like sharks snoring." | |
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In the American Dragon: Jake Long episode "Fu Dog Takes A Walk," despite being a talking dog, Fu Dog can't speak dog, so he has to rely on an English/Dog dictionary. His attempt to ask other dogs caught by a dog catcher "What are you in for?" ended up being "My pants taste like salami." | |
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Skippy's List: Specialist Skippy Schwarz apparently tried to get his Army buddies to perform this trope: | |
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In Star Trek: Lower Decks, Boimler once tried to calm down an angry Taxor in his language. | |
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Red vs. Blue: Donut is revealed at the end of Season 3 to be able to speak some Spanish. In Season 4, it's revealed that it was only a couple years of high school Spanish, and he apparently wasn't a great student: Lopez, the Red Team's robot, can only speak Spanish. Thing is, none of Rooster Teeth's staff actually know Spanish, so all of Lopez's lines are just fed through Babelfish. The results can be... odd for Spanish speakers. On top of that, voice actor Burnie Burns apparently often slipped into a faux-French accent when trying to deliver the lines, which they referenced in a non-canon joke episode by having Lopez inexplicably start speaking French. O'Malley asks Lopez how to instruct his Spanish-speaking robot army to "hurry up." Lopez instead tricks him into telling them that he likes to sniff his own butt, among other things: |
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ReBoot: In the episode "Mousetrap," during the celebration party, Matrix unintentionally draws his gun out of reflex and almost shoots Ray, so two of the Web Riders (whose language consists of high-pitched beeps, ala a dial-up modem) try to come at him. Ray tries to talk in their language, but the subtitles reveal he says "Handbag, teakeetle, barbeque". One of the Riders is naturally confused, but the other seems to catch the gist that he was trying to say they should calm down. | |
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When the Clans were introduced in BattleTech their BattleMechs were given Reporting Names by the Inner Sphere, including the Japanese-themed Draconis Combine. The 55-ton Stormcrow OmniMech was apparently supposed to be named something like Hunting Dog, which would have been Ry�ken. Instead, its name was listed as Ryoken, or Passport. | |
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A rare serious example comes from Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney in case 3. A Borginian witness is trying to testify. She says that she witnessed the crime through a "small window," but the only window at the scene of the crime is soundproof and was closed at the time of the murder. However, we find out later that she's talking about a vent. She had been crawling through the ventilation system for a magic trick. | |
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In the lost Mystery Science Theater 3000 short Assignment Venezuela, they invoke this trope as the short's narrator finds his phrasebook Spanish doesn't help him: | |
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In Splash, when Dr. Kornbluth (Eugene Levy) tries to pass off Allen (Tom Hanks) and Freddie (John Candy) as visiting Swedish scientists to get them into the research facility where Madison (Daryl Hannah) is being held, a suspicious guard asks Allen and Freddie in Swedish, "What are two Swedish scientists doing so far from Sweden?" The guard jovially allows them entry after Freddie tentatively responds in Swedish, "Hey, babe! I got a twelve inch penis." Freddie later explains that he picked up some Swedish phrases from watching hundreds of hours of Swedish pornography. | |
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The plot of Leisure Suit Larry 2: Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places) kicks off when Larry tries to hit on a Spanish-speaking woman with rather poor Spanish resulting in nonsensical phrases... that just happen to be the Spy Speak sign/countersign his Identical Stranger was supposed to use, leaving him with a microfilm containing state secrets and KGB agents on his tail. Larry's Spanish actually makes even less sense than the subtitles would have you believe, to the point of often not even containing real words. It seems the writers share his problem. They were, in many cases, VERY OBVIOUSLY not real words, and just adding another level of silliness for the player. | |
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The Meg: Upon first meeting Suyin, Morris attempts to greet her in Mandarin, but just spouts out a meaningless Word Salad that has everyone staring in confusion and disbelief. | |
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In one episode of PAW Patrol, a stranded Francois tries signaling to the Paw Patrol using semaphore (sign language done by waving flags), but according to (a very confused) Ryder, he's saying, "My cheese needs a hat." | |
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Despicable Me: When trying to convince Ms. Hattie that he knows Spanish, Gru says she has a face "como un burro" which translates to "like a donkey". It becomes a Brick Joke later when Hattie comes back to pick up the girls. | |
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Happens during a case involving two Latin dancers in Ally McBeal where John Cage, interrupting the two dancers (who constantly argue in Spanish) sputters out such phrases as 'I want to ride a little pony!' and 'I want a cookie!' to the bemusement of those present. | |
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In I'm a Marvel... And I'm a DC, having the languages of Spanish and Portuguese zapped into his brain, Green Goblin threatens the Joker with a foreign phrase that even he doesn't understand. It translates into "What a nice dress. May I try it on?" | |
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Ratchet & Clank has the Tyhrraguise in the third game, Up Your Arsenal, which is a disguise that has to be used to infiltrate the enemy base. While wearing the Tyhrraguise costume, making a mistake will create humorous examples while causing Ratchet to facepalm, such as: | |
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Looker from Pokémon. In most of his appearances, he's a Funny Foreigner who speaks broken Japanese (or English in some cases.) Pokémon X and Y shows he's from Kalos and speaks French fluently, but when a Kanto woman comes in, Looker mistranslates her. He thinks she's talking about tea when she's really saying her Pokemon have been kidnapped. | |
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In the RiffTrax of Iron Man, dialog with the Ten Rings is translated as "My tomato hurts," "Will you lick my hamster," "My ear hair is for sale," and "Sign my picture of Lauren Conrad." | |
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Fairest: A character attempts to give a gnome the Gnomish greeting, "Digging is good for the health and good for the wealth " but instead says, "Killing is good for the health and good for the wealth," causing said gnome to leap up and run away. As is explained later, she did realize it was most likely a translation error, but didn't want to stick around in case she was wrong. | |
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In Futurama: In "The Series Has Landed", Zoidberg attempts to test Fry's health by having him say something in his language. Fry, not knowing said language, tries anyway, and says something that evidently didn't sit well. Zapp tries to thank some Carcarons in their native tongue, unfortunately it translates to, "I'd like to spank your sister with a slice of bologna" which of course they take offense to. Kif also mentions that the last time he tried this it ended with a Mexican restaurant declaring war on them. In another episode, the Earth is invaded by an armada from an alien species that have no ears and communicate by dancing. Fry and Bender try to negotiate with the aliens by doing a "dance of peace," but their dancing ends up translating to "We will kill you and dishonor your widows by making them gather wood." |
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In The Hudsucker Proxy, Norville meets a foreign dignitary. He tries to speak to him in his own language, and gets punched out. | |
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The cast of 'Allo 'Allo! dread the appearance of Crabtree, "that English idiot who thinks he can speak French." While he technically knows the right words, his pronunciation is horrific and he usually comes out with ridiculous (and sometimes naughty-sounding) sentences such as "I was pissing (passing) by your coffee (café)." Of course, what's interesting is that this relies on the understanding that although the dialogue is in clear (if accented) English, the characters are actually "speaking" — and understanding — French. And Crabtree's dialogue is attempting to represent how a very bad French speaker would come across to them. Somehow the Germans never seem to suspect that he's a spy rather than a genuine French policeman. | |
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Scooby-Doo: What's New, Scooby-Doo?: When Mystery, Inc. go to Italy, Fred continually manages to misread his perfectly legitimate phrasebook, causing him to do things like requesting to rent a car that can outrace a flying hamster and ordering a potted plant at a restaurant. In an episode in Greece, he misread again when trying to figure out what a man who was chasing them was shouting. (Unfortunately, the phrasebook had "The Greek gods shall bring chaos into your lives!" right under "I'm trying to return your purse!" ). In an episode in France, Fred hails a taxi and tries to tell the driver to follow a car they are chasing in French. He ends up telling the driver that "a monkey took [his] potato." In Scooby-Doo! and the Monster of Mexico, Fred's Spanish speaking leaves something to be desired, though he usually gets most words right. Unfortunately, the few he gets wrong are enough to turn the sentence into gibberish (e.g., "Thank you for your wise words of ostrich."). Ironically, he's much more well-versed in Spanish grammar, as he manages to figure out a major clue from a threat written in Spanish containing an error a native wouldn't have made, meaning that their culprit likely doesn't speak Spanish. |
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Parodied in The Fairly OddParents!. Cosmo and Wanda are learning Spanish in Timmy's school. After learning how to say "Where is the stinky cheese", Cosmo responds with a Spanish phrase. Wanda points out the phrase means "I have a hog in my pants" and Cosmo produces a hog from his pants earning them extra credit. | |
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Referenced in one of the Portal 2 ARG mp3s in a "Language Learning Laboratory" tape for learning Spanish. Most of the phrases used are about potatoes, and range from odd to strange. "My hovercraft is full of potatoes" is one of the phrases. | |
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During the Civil War, Ben "The Thing" Grimm obtained asylum in France, becoming Paris' first superhero. He wondered why the bad guys would burst into laughter when he turned up at crime scenes shouting "C'EST LE TEMPS DE FOUTRER!" until a helpful gendarme explained that what he was saying was quite unrepeatable; after a quick French lesson he changed it to "C'EST LE FOIS A BATTRER! (IT'S CLOBBERING TIME!)" | |
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In the Kinsey Millhone book J is for Judgement, Kinsey goes to Mexico after having taken a Spanish class. She's mastered exactly one phrase ("Hay muchos gatos negros en los arboles.") | |
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What's New, Scooby-Doo?: When Mystery, Inc. go to Italy, Fred continually manages to misread his perfectly legitimate phrasebook, causing him to do things like requesting to rent a car that can outrace a flying hamster and ordering a potted plant at a restaurant. | |
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In The Amazing World of Gumball episode "The Wicked," Darwin tries to lambaste Mrs. Robinson while imitating her unintelligible "meh meh meh" speak. From her perspective, it comes out as "Three times did the cheese move sideways to Switzerland by radio. But, she never licked that parking permit." | |
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In Four Weddings and a Funeral, a girl learns sign language in order to talk to David, a deaf guy she's sweet on. She doesn't get it quite right... which makes her all the more adorable. | |
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In the first Saturday Night Live sketch, a professor (played by Michael O'Donoghue) teaches a European immigrant (played by John Belushi) several useful English phrases, including "I would like to feed your fingertips to the wolverines." | |
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During a boss fight in Gurumin: A Monstrous Adventure, a character tries to translate for The Unintelligible, and this comes up almost by name. | |
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Encino Man: Link can't say much, but he retains a few phrases from Spanish class when he accidentally crosses a Spanish-speaking bargoer. | |
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Studio Ghibli ran into trouble while marketing Laputa: Castle in the Sky in Spanish-speaking countries. "La puta" means "the whore" and the name was likely deliberately chosen as satire when Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels. Not a word you want to find in the children's section, at any rate. This is why Spanish children versions of the book (those that actually bother to tell what happened after Liliput, that is) change the floating island's name to Lupata or Lámputa. | |
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In novel Feet of Clay, Carrot is teaching Angua Dwarfish; when she tries to show it off to Cheery, she accidentally says "small delightful mining tool of a feminine nature." Carrot just thinks she's incorrect, because dwarves look the same genderwise. One of the earlier books explains this. | |
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In Second Empire's prequel Trapped in Amber, the main characters are Daleks attempting to break a Mechonoid siege on a Dalek base. Butt-Monkey Dalek soldier Grexzol is one of the few Daleks fluent in the Mechonoid language, but he is strictly forbidden from engaging the enemy in conversation, primarily because his accent is awful. When he and his battlegroup are caught attempting to sabotage a Mechonoid artillery piece, he defies orders and speaks to the guards in the Mechonoid barcode language. The guards immediately open fire. | |
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Game of Thrones: A Running Gag in Seasons 5 and 6 is that Tyrion's attempts to speak High Valyrian are absolutely awful due to how out of practice he is with it. As he puts it, he's "a little nostril" (rusty). This comes up again in the penultimate episode of Season 8, providing a bit of levity to an otherwise dark episode. When addressing to some Unsullied who are guarding a captive Jaime, he tries to say "I want to talk to the prisoner" but instead says "I drink to eat the skull keeper." As the baffled Unsullied stare at him, he tries a few more times to get it right, until they take pity on him and admit to speaking the Common Tongue. |
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In Borgel by Daniel Pinkwater, the title character gets into a conversation in a language he doesn't speak at all. His conversational partner later informs him that he'd claimed to be a politically corrupt sardine who likes to eat the tires off motorcycles. ("I said that?" "Like a native.") | |
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On an episode of The IT Crowd, one of Jen's lies was being fluent in Italian. Subtitles of her mumblings showed that she'd be saying things like "I like the smell of my cat" and "spiders," but this wasn't a problem because Moss got her an instant translation program on her laptop, allowing her to cover her lies and pass off as fluent over conference calls, even impressing an Italian business mogul (she was very good at pretending, if not at actually understanding). Things go south quickly when Douglas forbids her to bring her laptop to the first face to face meeting with the Italian man and her improvised Italian is so awful that no subtitles are even needed to see that she's just speaking English words with a pseudo-Italian tone and intonation. Including words like "Vienetta," "Fiat Punto," and "Super Mario" as Italian words. | |
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In one episode of Celebrity Deathmatch, Peter Mayhew does his "famous Chewbacca growl" after the audience insists... only to have an alien respond with "Whaa? Nobody talks that way about my momma!" Hilarity ensues. | |
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Parker does this in Leverage, while trying to rescue a group of abused Serbian children. She has a phrase book, but what she says is subtitled as: She eventually gets the kids to go with her by, after nearly giving up, meekly offering "Haagen-dazs?" Later, she reacts to getting caught by exclaiming, "Oh, shiny tomato!" |
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Hermitcraft Season 9: During Bdubs' first visit to Sanctuary in the crossover with Empires SMP Season 2, he continuously mispronounces the empire's patron goddess Santa Perla's name as "Santa Perra". In Spanish, perra refers to a female dog. Sausage, the Protector of Sanctuary and the reincarnation of ALSMP-Sausage, is not particularly happy about this. | |
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Justice League (2017): The Flash rescues a Russian family. He tries to tell them goodbye, and says, "Dostoevsky!" which doesn't mean anything, unless referring to Fyodor Dostoevsky. The correct word is "Dasvidanya." The family looks confused as he leaves. | |
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In Living Color! does their own take here. An unassuming American ambassador is assigned to work in a third world country. Her interpreter is a trickster of a man and not much of a diplomat. Whoever taught her the sentence to say played a sick joke on her as well. Strange how she can be this naive, though. | |
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On Spin City, Paul claims to be able speak fluent Portuguese. His attempt to bid farewell to the mayor is translated as "My monkey needs a haircut." | |
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Kyo'nne of Drowtales claims that she can speak Halme (the local human dialect) and teaches a few lines to Vaelia when she has to sneak into a Halme settlement, where it's then shown that this is the case with her. It somewhat makes sense in that she was trying to have her say she was coming to get cheese, but came out as "I am woman of cheese." | |
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In Minecraft, the in-game text can be translated into almost any language. The languages are named only in that language (Spanish is Espanol, etc.), and only in that language's alphabet. The languages are also listed in alphabetical order of said names. This is where the problem comes in: The Hebrew word for Hebrew transliterates as "Ivrit." However, Hebrew is listed under "H" in the list, and it instead says "Anglit," which, besides not starting with "H," is the Hebrew word for English. | |
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In Zoolander, Derek actually speaks Malay, but addresses the Malaysian prime minister as "Mister Prime Rib of Propecia." | |
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This Bites!: Vivi, when she accidentally uses the wrong sign-language dialect to communicate with octopi. Spandam, when talking with Kaku via sign language (since a furious Sengoku is on the nearby Transponder Snail): |
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In Redshirts, after learning that newly arrived Ensign Dahl is from Forshan, Science Officer Q'eeng attempts a traditional Forshan greeting. He makes two mistakes. First, he uses the greeting of the rightward schism in the language of the leftward schism, and second, his appalling accent turns "I offer you the bread of life" into the nonsensical "Let us violate cakes together." | |
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In Blue Streak, the cops LET a criminal pretending to be a foreigner get away, and understood exactly what he said. | |
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In Peter and the Starcatchers, Molly Aster can communicate with porpoises fluently... except for the standard greeting, which she always mistakes for the phrase for "My teeth are green." She remains blissfully unaware of this throughout the novel because the porpoise Ammm is too polite to correct her. In Peter and the Sword of Mercy, her daughter makes a similar mistake. | |
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When Hägar the Horrible tries to order food in a restaurant in French, he ends up being served a living octopus with an aside of a herd of goats, a woman on stilts pouring something on his head from a jug, and a man playing a horn. | |
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The reason that Empath in Empath: The Luckiest Smurf can't fluently speak in Smurf is because his words end up sounding like this trope to other Smurfs. | |
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The Monty Python's Flying Circus is the Trope Namer: the confusing and increasingly offensive sentences come from an English phrasebook for Hungarians. Examples include "I will not buy this record, it is scratched" written instead of "I'd like to buy a pack of cigarettes, please" and "My hovercraft is full of eels" for "I'd also like a box of matches" — what a scheme! Moreover, the correct phrases are evidently matched up with very offensive meanings in Hungarian, given the reaction. The publisher is later seen being prosecuted for malice aforethought after causing misfortune to scores of hapless Hungarians while visiting the UK; when the prosecutor reads a sample from the book, the publisher pleads incompetence. | |
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In the JAG episode "Fighting Words," a US Marine tries to say, "Stop or I will shoot," in Arabic during a classroom training session, but according to an Iraqi woman who's helping with the class, he actually said, "Stop or I will release the mice." | |
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Quest for Glory II allows the player to talk to a griffin, but the griffin only answers in squawks, which are then poorly translated. | |
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Trigger Happy TV had a recurring sketch featuring a Scandinavian man asking random people on the streets very poorly worded and outrageous questions or statements, with a thick Scandinavian accent. | |
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Andromeda: When Harper tries to say an old Vedran proverb ("A wise man knows his limitations") to Rev but ends up saying, "A fast swimmer keeps no pets." Since Vedran is a made-up language, there is, understandably, no way to verify that. He also tries to brag to Beka that he can speak "Old Earth Gaelic" by stating "Love is my language;" unfortunately, he ended up saying "Love is our sandwich." He was speaking fluent Vedran (among dozens of other alien languages including Than) earlier in the same episode and even singing in them. However, this was because he had All-Systems Library downloaded into his brain. After it was extracted, he forgot everything about that day. | |
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Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Anyone with even just the most basic knowledge of Spanish can tell that Susan Heffley doesn't understand it nearly as well as she thinks she does—she thinks "Tengo hambre" means "Tango hamburgers" (it actually means "I'm hungry") and she thinks that "Te amo" means "What is your name?" (it actually means "I love you"). It embarrasses a younger Greg when he once tried asking a Spanish-speaking waiter what his name was by repeatedly saying, "Te amo." | |
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One Detour in Season 14 of The Amazing Race required teams to listen to customers ordering food in Chinese, then repeat the orders to a chef. It was easy for Tammy and Victor since they spoke the language, but Kisha and Jen had a little difficulty: instead of ordering "New Taste Beef" they ordered "Oil Comes Again to Please the Mouth," and "Golden Pork Spare Ribs" got lost in translation as "Light Competition Red Dishes I've Played Before." | |
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Johnny English: When Johnny (Rowan Atkinson) tries to speak in romantic Japanese to Lorna, he ends up telling her, "May all your daughters be born with three bottoms." Made even funnier to people who actually know Japanese, as what Johnny says is different from what is in the subtitles. What he actually says is "May your daughters have little penises attached to them." |
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ER: In an episode, Pratt thought he was encouraging a pregnant woman to push. Instead he was calling her a whore. Her husband understandably was enraged and she was horrified. A rare serious example occurs when a Spanish woman was brought in with an overdose, and her husband said she was taking her prescribed medication as instructed. The instructions were only in English and said to take a pill 'once a day', but the Spanish word for 'eleven' is 'once', but with a different pronunciation. She died of the overdose. |
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QI: In series F's episode about the future, Stephen Fry uses this phrase as an example sentence in Esperanto. After some hints, Rob Brydon goes from My cousin is a meerkat of strange angles to the words for 'eels' and 'hovercraft'. When he puts the sentence together, he still can't believe it: Also from QI is Fred MacAulay's report of a Burns Night being held in Germany, where Robbie Burns' "Address to a Haggis" was translated into German, and then translated back into English, resulting in the line "Great chieftain o' the puddin' race" being translated as "Mighty fuhrer of the Sausage People..." |
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Top Gear: Presenter James May is given a Romanian phrasebook which has been purposefully mistranslated. When May inevitably gets lost, his attempts to ask directions only confuse the locals. Hammond, when speaking French, says things like 'le grand champignon', when he means the grand champion. 'Le grand champignon' is, literally 'the big mushroom'. It gets worse when he says "il y a beaucoup de lapins dans ma pantalon" which means "there are a lot of rabbits in my trousers." Clarkson attempted to learn Ukrainian on a long trip across Ukraine. His breakfast order for the three of them results in a head of raw cabbage. It is unknown whether or not he was being trolled, given that he seemed to genuinely be trying and some of the things he said just not translating culturally. Impressively, by the end, he was able to say a few comprehensible things in Ukrainian, only for the hotel clerk to respond in English. "Yes." In one instance, he asked a roadside merchant "Where are your legs?" No idea what he was trying to say. Immediately afterwards, he said "I'll eat your souvenirs." This one is actually somewhat understandable, because there is the possibility that he might have been told that souvenirs could be a generic term for shop goods, or at least that would be the only word he'd have. And then the English can say things like "I'll eat" to indicate that they would like to order a dish. Nicely averted in the Vietnam special: the boys have to earn a license before they can ride their motorbikes, which includes an oral section. This results in Clarkson answering perfectly, to which he says to his stunned co-hosts "Did neither of you bother to learn Vietnamese before coming here?". |
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In a third season episode of Sailor Moon, the girls are introduced to an Englishman friend of Mamoru's. They employ their English language class and all manage a decent greeting (Minako: Nice to meet you. Rei: Hello. Ami: I'm glad to see you.) except Makoto, who spouts off "Thank You!" Ami's is only barely better than Makoto's, really. It's not that there's anything technically wrong with her greeting, but considering she's meeting a stranger for the first time, "I'm glad to see you" is hardly a fitting greeting. |
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Total Drama Presents: The Ridonculous Race: During one of Dwayne's many attempts to repeat the phrase "Please give me my next travel tip" in Icelandic to the tip giver in "Bjorken Telephone", he somehow ends up saying "Please give me my next travel asshole". No wonder he got slapped. | |
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One of the few comedic moments in Sleeper (WildStorm): "That's right, horse breathers! I shit your branch!" It is of course followed by violence, death threats, and murder. | |
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Panthera gives us Onca's interest in mango fucking and boiling flowers. She's only been practicing the language for a few hours at best. | |
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Mickey Mouse Comic Universe: In "The Horrid Invasion," Mickey and Goofy land on an alien planet. Mickey uses a translating megaphone Goofy built to send a welcoming speech to the local inhabitants... the problem is that Goofy built it so that "words comprehensible in their language will come out," without actually translating the original lines. So the aliens hear a bunch of nonsequiturs peppered with a few insults and send them off. | |
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In a crossover between Big Trouble in Little China and Escape from New York, a police officer decides to pull in Snake Plissken to help with a problem and uses a spell written in Mandarin. He pulls it off, but not only does he drag in Snake, he also brings in Jack Burton. It's handwaved by saying that Snake and Jack are the same guy in other dimensions. Wonderful thing Actor Allusion is. | |
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In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "School Hard," while studying French, Buffy says something in French that translates to "The cow should touch me from Thursday."note La vache devrait me toucher de jeudi. And she said it wrong.note No kidding. She says, "La vache doit me touche de la jeudi" in an atrocious accent with English pronunciations. This means (roughly) what they say it does, with a few caveats. First, the indicative present "doit" means "must;" to get "should," one should use the conditional "devrait." Second, she conjugates the verb "toucher" ("to touch") rather than using the infinitive. Finally, her use of the definite article "la" before "jeudi" ("Thursday") is nonsensical. The last could possibly be interpreted to mean "every Thursday," but that makes even less sense; one would use the definite article "le" instead, since days of the week are grammatically masculine, not grammatically feminine. | |
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GURPS Japan has a section explaining the problems foreigners can run into while attempting to speak Japanese, including how a few slight variations in tone and pronunciation can change "I want carrots and vegetables for dinner" into "My sister owns a demon who eats spies." | |
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Doom: In the text file for "Nessus" (one of the levels from the Master Levels of Doom pack), the storyline contains this tidbit: | |
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Negima! Magister Negi Magi: Shortly after arriving in Japan, Albert Chamomile tries to tell Negi that Nodoka is being attacked by... well, we don't know exactly what he was trying to say, because the Japanese word he used means "fried chicken" (perhaps he meant "jellyfish"). Note that Chamo didn't have any reason to speak Japanese, as Negi is also a native speaker of English. Interestingly, this wouldn't be the last reference to fried chicken we'd see in this series... ç—´æ¼¢ is a Japanese phrase for a molester, and is romanized as "chikan". "Fried Chicken" is a loanword in Japanese and doesn't have an actual word for it, but the pronunciation in Japanese of "フライドãƒ�ã‚ン" is similar to ç—´æ¼¢ (cheek-een vs cheek-ahn) so it's highly likely that Akamatsu was making a pun using the two. Ku-Fei, upon meeting Al (who happens to be going under the guise of "Ku-Nel Sanders"), mistakes his name for Ku-Neru (which translates roughly into "Eat and be healthy," or so the manga says). Literally translated, ku-neru means eat-sleep. |
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In Star Control, everyone has universal Translator Microbes, but they still occasionally mess up. This is most obvious with the Orz ("I have anticipation and then what? Better *parties* in *the middle* to be sure."), but Fwiffo also trips over an English idiom: "The Ilwrath were meant to be the most rigid crest... er, the most unyielding flipper?... ah, yes, the BACKBONE of the Earthguard forces.." | |
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In the first issue of Havoc Inc., Chris and Chester are trying to negotiate for horses using a phrasebook that was written intentionally badly. The merchant concluded they were crazy zealots and gave them a pair of horses just to get rid of them. The book makes them say such things as "I have a frog and much money. I only pray you will take me for all I am worth", "Show me your rubbish, I must browse!", and "My monkey will wash your vegetables." Fortunately, they get away from town before Chris read the passage that translates as "Shoot me now, for I have known your mother many times." | |
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Harry Potter and the Boiling Isles: It takes awhile for Harry to get a handle on Beast-tongue (somehow giving a particularly impressive Cluster F-Bomb while trying to ask about the weather, and saying something that makes Puddles the griffin so angry Harry can only assume he insulted her mother), while Ron's efforts at Spanish are likewise gibberish. | |
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Done twice on Drop the Dead Donkey, once with Russian (Henry introduces himself as a pregnant cabbage to a Soviet official on a factfinding exchange) and once with Japanese (Damien tells a group of Japanese businessmen to go and have sex with a porcupine). It's implied in the latter case Damien was told the wrong phrase as a practical joke. | |
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In an issue of Justice League Europe, while discussing a failed robbery, Major Disaster points out, with much irritation, how Multi-man had to memorize just a few words of French, meaning: "This is a stick-up!" What came out as he went up to the guard: "Dance with my uncle's ostrich!" They attend a French language class at night school, also attended by members of the Justice League, hilarity and mayhem ensue. | |
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At one point in Sing, Buster tries to offer the red panda Girl Group who keep showing up a chance to fill in a new vacancy in the performance schedule. However, since they only speak Japanese, he has to resort to using a phrasebook to get his point across; whatever he says, the girls are so offended that they slap him and storm off. Apparently what he inadvertently said was, "You are smelly. Like toenails." | |
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It's not uncommon for western fans of all things Japanese to mispronounce "kawaii" (kah-wah-ee) as "kowai" (kah-why/koh-why) meaning "scary." Gwen Stefani included. Another trap is that in Japanese, you can add "so" to some adjectives to mean "it looks ..." For example, "oishii" means "delicious" and "oishiso" means "it looks delicious." But "kawaii" is an exception as "kawaiso" means "I feel sorry" or "pitiful" rather than "it looks cute." |
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In Girls with Slingshots, Chris starts learning American Sign Language so he can communicate with his new girlfriend Melody other than by texting. In one strip she signs by cupping her hand into a "c" and motioning from throat to stomach. He blushes and begins to take off his shirt. Then, noticing her blushing as well, he says, "Oh wait, that means you're hungry," to which she signs "Yes yes yes." Although the joke is clear on its own from both their reactions, the specific mistake Chris made is that making the cupped-hand throat-to-stomach motion once means "I'm hungry," whereas doing it repeatedly means "I'm horny." Earlier example: |
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The novelization of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country provides a more rational explanation for why the Enterprise crew was scrambling to look up Klingon phrases in old paper books, instead of using the Universal Translator. The saboteur(s) who had altered the ship's logs to make it look like the Enterprise had fired on the Chancellor's ship had also wiped the Klingon language data from the memory banks specifically to keep the Enterprise from being able to properly communicate when they crossed into Klingon space. The books were part of Uhura's personal collection, not part of the ship's library, so they were not affected. The Klingons that were encountered, fortunately, figured anyone that sounded so incompetent had to be petty smugglers and were therefore not worth the trouble of stopping. | |
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Dice Funk: Anne can speak a number of different languages, however her intelligence (or lack of) tends to get in the way. | |
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In ReGenesis, David Sandstrom, while in China, is arrested by soldiers, and tries to tell them "I'm a Canadian citizen." Because he gets the tones wrong, it comes out as "I'm a false personality." | |
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ElfQuest: The human explorer Cam Triompe makes a good show of elfin speech, not previously spoken by any human in the series ever unless they were raised by the elves, and says "I from over what I call Redmist Cabbage! Uh, no. Redmist Ocean!" In later years and later stories, however, Cam becomes much more fluent. Cam was apparently the first human of his continent to speak the elfin language, but by that time (in the series "New Blood"), another, transplanted human tribe that worshiped elves as deities had adopted the elf-tongue as its own language. | |
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Long long ago, in I Love Lucy, Lucy was meeting her in-laws the Ricardos of Cuba for the first time. She tries to be polite with a few memorized phrases, but botches the pronunciation. So instead of saying a polite "Thank you" to Ricky's uncle, she calls him a "big, fat pig." Hilarity Ensues. | |
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In The Lion Guard episode "Can't Wait to be Queen," Simba has to give a tribute to his deceased elephant friend in Elephantese, which he has trouble speaking. When he attempts to say that his friend was a good elephant, he instead says "He had poop on him" by accident. Thankfully, he doesn't get into trouble as the elephants simply laugh, note that the deceased did frequently have poop on him, and thank Simba for lightening the mood. | |
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In Daisy Owl, at one point Steve is introduced to his long-lost family. His inability to speak Bear makes it seem like he's choking. | |
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One anecdote in the sequel to Three Men in a Boat, set in Germany, has George bewildered when he tries to buy a cushion from a German shop and the three young sales girls throw him out. Turns out the word George had used for 'cushion' was Kussen, which sounds very similar to the word for 'to kiss' ("küssen"); made even more hilarious by the fact that the correct German word would be Kissen. | |
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Burn Notice's Michael Westen is usually pretty good at foreign languages, making this example all the more hilarious. In one episode he steals some documents from the Pakistani consulate and leaves a written message in Urdu for the chief of security to meet him at a restaurant. The chief comes into the restaurant with the message and says this: | |
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Frasier: In "The Perfect Guy." In another episode, Niles and Frasier attempt to confront Maris' German fencing instructor whom she has been having an affair with. Unfortunately, the man doesn't speak English but Niles' maid speaks German...yet she has a very poor grasp of English herself, meaning Frasier has to translate what Niles is saying to Spanish so the maid can translate it again to the fencing instructor. Everything seems to be going fine until Frasier mistranslates "You have stolen Niles' wife" as "You have stolen Niles' shoes." For some reason, this infuriates the guy prompting him and Niles to duel preceded by this priceless exchange: Happens again later in the episode when Frasier tries to tell the fencing instructor that his wife loves him very much, but the maid's confusion with pronouns means it gets translated as "your wife loves me very much." Unsurprisingly, the instructor attacks him too. |
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During a visit to Hong Kong on The Navy Lark, CPO Pertwee buys a phrasebook that seems to consist of nothing but these. | |
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Babylon 5: Ivanova tries to show Marcus and Delenn how she's been learning Minbari and can therefore command the Minbari crew of the White Star. Her attempt is subtitled "Engines at full, high power, hatrack ratcatcher, to port weapons, brickbat lingerie." After Delenn has diplomatically suggested that Ivanova allow herself or Marcus to translate her orders to the White Star crew and Ivanova has gone out of earshot, Delenn orders Marcus to warn the crew that anyone who laughs at Ivanova's... creative... Minbari will answer to her personally. Given how most Minbari are depicted as being rather stoic, anything that could make them laugh would probably have to be quite a howler. In a later episode, it is revealed that Minbari humor focuses on both puns and failure to attain enlightment, so it's likely that the usually serious crew would have found Ivanova's mixups hilarious. She pulls another one later, while ranting, in her broken Minbari, about their current situation. She ends her rant with an exclamation of "Ah, hell!" — in English, of course. The Minbari weapons officer, however, promptly opens fire on absolutely nothing. When Ivanova seems completely confused by this, Lorien explains that "ahell" means "continuous fire" in Minbari. There were numerous occasions to throw in a Continuity Nod to this later; alas, the series never does. In season two, the new commanding officer of Babylon 5 is attacked by a Minbari and defends himself with a conveniently-placed weapon. When Sheridan has the assailant at his mercy, he demands surrender — to which the Minbari replies, "Death first." Later on, in a pseudo-legal proceeding, a Minbari witness claims the assailant actually said something that sounds similar ("Deth feherst" or some such) but means "I yield to your authority." This actually turned out to be a complete lie, but the other Minbari seemed to consider it plausible. |
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Men in Black: The Series: In "The Undercover Syndrome," Agent J is required to learn some of an alien language to effectively masquerade as a member of that species, and puts too much stress on a single syllable, causing nearby aliens to laugh. Agent K informs him that he just turned "Hello" into "Hello, Sailor!" It happens with aliens, as seen with the Emperor Worm when he visits Earth in "The Mine, Mine, Mine Syndrome;" he claims to have learned English from "Books on tapeworm," and greets humans with things like, "Greetings from my bottom!" The only phrase of English he can speak properly is "I am large and in charge." |
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Del on Only Fools and Horses is notorious for speaking foreign phrases, mostly French, which he often gets badly mixed up. Notable examples include using Au revoir for 'hello', Mange tout for 'Of course!', Creme de la menthe for 'The very best' and uses Chateauneuf du Pape! as a swear word. And who can forget Pot Pourri used as 'I don't believe it." | |
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The Goon Show: It would sometimes have Neddie rattle off a rapid fire string of French only for Moriarty to respond at the end "So, the pen of your aunt is the garden, eh?" Or: |
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In the Mighty Max episode "Beetlemania," Max attempts to calm a Peruvian woman down by talking to her in Spanish. Bea giggles and informs Max that he just said "Don't cry. We'll eat your feet." | |
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In Over the Hedge, Verne tries to learn to speak Dude, in which complex sentences can be conveyed just by pronouncing "dude" the right way. He never comes close. | |
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Rob says this verbatim (My Hovercraft is Full of Eeels) in episode four of Unforgotten Realms (only in the "classic" series and not the new one) when Mike asks what he was saying in Wolf-Language. It Makes Sense in Context. | |
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In the Lilo & Stitch/Star Trek crossover Starlight, Experiment 426 has a lot of trouble understanding Tantalog, the language Stitch and the other experiments speak, and his translations often end up like this. In one of the later fics in the series, A Trip To Japan, it's revealed that 426 is just as inept at Japanese as he is at Tantalog. |
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In Sturgeon's Law, Jenn tries out the Japanese she learned from anime when checking into a hotel, despite the concierge's being fluent in English. | |
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In the Dexter's Laboratory episode "Got Your Goat," Dee-Dee and Dexter travel to the jungles of Central America searching for the Chupacabra. They encounter some angry locals who accuse them of being poachers, but Dee-Dee thinks they're asking if she and Dexter are thirsty. She tries to respond yes, and ends up babbling "I enjoy hamburgers and trousers, but I prefer green balloons!" in Spanish. | |
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Mission to Zyxx has in-universe language Juntowa, which consists entirely of tonal variations on the word "Juntowa". Non-native speakers who attempt it inevitably enrage native speakers with their rudeness, though it's never clear what statement they're actually making. | |
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The Wrong Reflection: Referenced when Birail Riyannis asks Koren, daughter of Grilka, if she pronounced the name of Koren's ship correctly. Koren confirms she did, and Eleya comments in her Internal Monologue that it was a good thing, considering what "QuHvaj’Qob" turns into if you miss the glottal stop (the apostrophe). | |
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My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels | |
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In one episode of Cold Case, a politician that Rush and Valens are trying to interview is first seen attempting to apologize in Spanish to two men from a Hispanic organization for having to cut a meeting short, but instead of using the correct phrase "lo siento mucho" (I'm very sorry), he phrases it as "me siento mucho". | |
My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels / int_ff2165b | featureApplicability |
1.0 | |
My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels / int_ff2165b | featureConfidence |
1.0 | |
Cold Case | hasFeature |
My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels / int_ff2165b |
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