Incidents of In My Language, That Sounds Like... specifically involving the Italian language.
- Portuguese "engraçado/a" ("funny; amusing") sounds like Italian "ingrassato/a" ("to have gained weight").
- "barato" means "cheap; inexpensive" in Spanish and "cheated" in Italian.
- "il burro" means "butter" in Italian. "el burro" means "donkey" in Spanish.
- "dai" in Italian means "come on". It's pronounced exactly like the English word "die".
- In Korean "kaka" (까까) is a child's way of saying "snacks". In Japanese kakka (閣下) is a suffix meaning "Your/His/Her Excellency", while kakka written in hiragana (かっか) means both "to burn hotly" and "to lose your temper". And in Italian, caca means "to shit".
- In Italy, you can go to the market and buy some "rape" (turnips).
- In Italian, "fagotto" is either a bundle or a bassoon. In Japanese, Russian, German, and Polish, a close homonym is the word for bassoon.
- The Italian word "caldo" means "hot". This can cause problems for tourists speaking languages where something similar sounding means the exact opposite, e. g. German "kalt" and English "cold". If you want to avoid getting confused, when you see the word "caldo" think of "scald" rather than "cold" (and for the word actually meaning "cold" — "freddo" — think "fridge" or "freezing"). In the Billy Wilder comedy Avanti!, Jack Lemmon's character gets an unpleasant surprise when he turns on the faucet marked "C" in an Italian hotel.
- Caldo could be a dish, similar to a soup, in Spanish.
- In Indonesian Kaldu means stock (as in beff/chicken stock).
- Another example: Italian "asso" ("ace").
- Finnish and Italian have many examples.
- Finnish katso! [ˈkatso] ("look!"), Italian cazzo! [ˈkatːso] ("dick" or "fuck!" as an exclamation).
- Finnish katso merta! [ˈkatso ˈmerdɑ] ("look at the sea!"), Italian ''cazzo! merda!'' ("fuck! shit!")
- Finnish katso minkkiä [ˈkatso ˈmiŋkːiæ] ("look at the mink"), Italian cazzo minchia [ˈkatːso ˈmiŋkja] ("cock dick")note
- Finnish katso sukkia ("look at the socks") sounds like You No Take Candle Italian for a request for fellatio ("succhia" means "suck")
- In Italian "infarto" means "heart attack (infarction)".
- The Italian words "farti" and "fartelo" have nothing to do with flatulence: they both roughly mean "make you (something)".
- While Chicago doesn't really mean anything in English, in Italian it sounds like "ci cago", which means "I shit there".
- The videogame company Sega sounds inherently funny to Italians. Why? "Sega" means "wank" in Italian. To be fair, it also means "handsaw", but that's not the first meaning that comes to mind...
- That's why the name was pronounced SEE-gah in Italian ads.
- "Tröja" is a Swedish word meaning "sweater". Italian "troia" means "whore".
- The Italian word for "down", "giù," sounds exactly like "Jew".
- The Italian word for "hi" or "bye", "ciao", sounds like the English word "chow", slang for "food" or "to eat".
- Imagine you're learning a list of Italian names for animals and see the word "ape". It doesn't mean what it looks like — it's a bee (in English "apiarist" is the fancy word for "beekeeper").
- In Bulgarian, "сера" [sera] means "to poop". In Italian, "sera" means "evening".
- There's a joke about an Italian football team visiting Bulgaria and then departing with chants "Saluti e baci" ("greetings and kisses"). To a Bulgarian, however, that sounds like "[they] are some sassy fuck-machines". Female fans commented "yeah, they only lived up to the sassy part".
- Ciara, an Irish name meaning "dark", is pronounced similar to the Italian name Chiara, which means "bright".
- In Italian "lucchetto" looks like "locket" but means "padlock". This caused confusion when translating Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, where a locket is referred to as a padlock. (The same mistake happened in the Hungarian translation, because the Hungarian word for "padlock" is also similar to the English word for "locket".)
