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Sometimes one will find that in a work where the Translation Convention is otherwise in effect or which offers translations of the important information will either suspend the convention or omit translation for the sake of including messages "hidden in plain view" by being expressed or written in another language. This ostensibly makes said messages available only to those viewers, players or readers that have sufficient knowledge of the language in question. This often coincides with Ominous Latin Chanting (which, if translated, might sound about as ominous as reading street addresses from a telephone book); in Video Games specifically, this is often concurrent with Enemy Chatter.
As you may have guessed, this can be a very clever way of Getting Crap Past the Radar. In fact, Hollywood censors once demanded English translations of any part of a screenplay written in a foreign language (whether that language was real or made-up) precisely to thwart this, since subtitles traditionally weren't used in American films even when a character was speaking a language other than English.
If the word still makes sense in another way then it's also a Multiple Reference Pun.
This, of course, not only applies to actual languages, but also the various fictional languages that have full-blown lexicons and can technically be translated — Quenya and Sindarin, Klingon, D'ni from the Myst verse, et cetera.
This trope is not "This work happens to have a foreign language in it." It is "Hidden message in foreign language that is different from what might normally be expected in the context"
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Cowboy Bebop has plenty of those, from texts in foreign languages all over the place to Ed’s father’s name being ‘Excuse me, check please’ in Turkish.
- Video Girl Ai is a double-language pun, with "Ai" meaning both love and Artificial Intelligence.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion: in the North American dub, Asuka holds an entire telephone conversation in German in the background of one scene; there are allegedly several in-jokes in her dialogue for German speakers who ignore the foreground action to concentrate on her.
- The English dub's Asuka's voice actress is fluent in German and does much better. There's a bilingual bonus in Asuka's phone call home too, she's lying about the fantastic time she's having in Japan.
- One episode features a GEHIRN report in English. Freeze-framing it reveals a short written history of Studio Gainax with periodic in-universe terms in all caps.
- In Wolf's Rain the signs are all written in Russian, and several jokes are there for the Russian-speaking audience. For instance, the "X" on Hige's collar is actually a Russian Kh (pronounced like the "ch" in "Bach", like his name). Hige is later referred to by Lady Jagara as "Number 23" - i.e. the 23rd wolf to wear one of her collars - and the Cyrillic X or Kh happens to be the 23rd letter of the (modern) Cyrillic alphabet. Coincidence?
- In Welcome to the NHK the main character prances through half the series wearing sweatshirts with the mysterious letters XYN - actually, a corruption of Russian "хуй" (spells out "huy" in Cyrillic). This just happens to be one of the few absolutely taboo words in the Russian language, literally the male penis, but also ranging in meaning from "fuck off" to "cunt" (the insult, not the matching organ) depending on context.
- Galaxy Angel does this in an episode where Forte is turned into a guy. Ranpha gives Forte a love letter in English. When Forte reads out loud in Japanese it sounds perfectly normal, however, the text on the letter itself is nothing but stock reports, making the joke much funnier.
- In the Fullmetal Alchemist anime, all books are written in English. If you ignore the occasional alchemical array, they are copied verbatim from Dungeons and Dragons player's manuals. Specifically, articles concerning alchemy.
- More English is a butcher shop whose menu includes beef, pork, chicken and mammoth.
- A military document has an excerpt from Ripley's Twelve Gates, a 16th century treatise on alchemy. Which excerpt? The one the that happens to also appear on the human transmutation circle.
- Similar to the Fullmetal Alchemist example, Gundam Wing has two such instances of random English text. In the first, a medical readout on Heero is actually the readme file for Photoshop's TWAIN plugin. In the second, the blueprints for Sandrock contain a number of Shout Outs to Mobile Suit Gundam, including references to Gundarium and the ALICE AI system from Gundam Sentinel.
- When you think about how TWAIN in Photoshop stands for "Thing Without An Interesting Name", Heero certainly falls under suspicion.
- In one point in the Master Mosquiton OAV, Saint Germaine is trying to convince Schrodinger (of Schrodinger's cat fame) to join his cause. Schrodinger throws a die, which rolls over the book he's reading; it is, verbatim, a page from a 3D modeling software instruction manual.
- In the second season of Emma, episode 3, when William's father summons him to his study, there is a brief establishing shot of the account book he's been reading over, with entries all in English. All of them are Beatles songs.
- The three Zentradi spies from Super Dimension Fortress Macross are named Warera, Loli, and Conda, which put together reads as, "We have a Lolita Complex" in Japanese...whether or not they actually do is open to debate. In the Robotech version they are called Bron, Rico, and Konda instead.
- In Macross Frontier, the on-screen displays populated with English filler text use completely irrelevant excerpts from, for example, the Adobe Flash Player (or Adobe CS?) EULA and an article about the appearance of Oakley sunglasses in some bicycle or motorcycle event.
- Except in the Sayonara no Tsubasa movie, Sheryl Nome's profile displayed is an extract from the wiki article.
- Mai-HiME, specifically the title- it contains no less than five different puns in both English and Japanese, which we won't tell you about for some reason.
- The English dub of Hellsing Ultimate has once instance of this: in the 3rd episode when Seras is escorting the Japanese tourists, the tourists have been redubbed in Japanese, and are apparently saying very rude things about the English staff working on the episode.
- The pre-opening credits sequence in Slayers Revolution has a pun on the Japanese possessive particle "no" ("の" in hiragana) and the English word "no": the captions on the wanted poster for Lina are "AKUMA NO MIMI"*
demon's ears , "AKUMA NO KUCHI"* demon's mouth , and "NO BUST".
- Fairy Tail has a Shrouded in Myth Master of Illusion S Class Mage by the name of Mystogan (Mist Gun). In the High School AU OVA, he's the school gardener, and carries a pair of squirt bottles everywhere he goes.
- Sailor Moon has references in English in at least two separate references to U.S. culture.
- In Nabari No Ou, when Raimei and Raikou fight for the first time, Gau is listening to Strauss’s “Unter Donner und Blitz", which is German for “Under Thunder and Lightning”. Incidentally, Raimei's name means "thunder", while Raikou's name means "lightning". And what happens "under" thunder and lightning is a rain shower...in other words, Gau.
Comic Books
- The current trope image.
- Fantastic Four #542 includes Ben Grimm's adventures in France (his response to the super hero civil war) as well as his attempts at speaking the French language (specifically, trying to say "It's clobberin' time" in French. He's less than successful).
Thing: That just means il est temps de foutre!
Anais: Pardon?
Thing: What?
Anais: You said "foutre". I think you meant to say, "Il est temps de barte!"
Thing: Oh. I guess I got excited.
Fanfiction
Film
Literature
- The 1961 novel Catch-22 by Joseph Heller features the aptly named character Lieutenant Scheissekopf, which means "shithead" in German. At one point his superior snarls at him, "Scheissekopf, you shithead!"
- Terry Pratchett occasionally includes a few of these, though several of them are explained or translated later. Some of them are not, however - for example, in Soul Music, the main character Imp y Celyn talks about and later plays a song he wrote himself, titled "Sioni Bod Da." Since Soul Music is almost in its entirety a completely awesome Discworldization of the entire rock music movement in general, it should come as no surprise that there's a couple of hidden reference there. One is indirectly explained: "Imp" means Bud and "Celyn" means Holly, hence "Bud y Holly." On the other hand, Sioni Bod Da is mostly unexplained: It's Welsh for Johnny Be Good. (Read: Johnny B. Goode.)
- In the French version, Patrick Couton translated the pun in Breton: Imp y Celyn became Kreskenn Kelen and his song was called Yannick Bez Mad.
- A Discworld example from Making Money: "Jikan no Muda", the Discworld equivalent of Sudoku, translates in Japanese to "Waste of Time".
- This is a trilingual bonus in Croatian. Muda is slang for balls. Jikan (written Đikan) is pejorative for an urban hick with delusions of superiority. "Jikan no Muda" is a "Waste of Time" for "Neutered Morons".
- Recurring example: The Sto Plains. "Sto" is "hundred" in Polish. Thus there is the town of Sto Lat, which translates to "a hundred years". Sto Lat is also the name of the Polish equivalent of "Happy Birthday to You." ("May (s)he live a hundred years").
- And in Russian, Sto Lat means "a hundred plate mails".
- Don't forget "Liber Paginarum Fulvarum" the proper name of the Necrotelicomnicon (Essentially a phonebook for the dead) which translates, loosely as "The Yellow Pages".
- Also see the motto of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, "Fabricati Diem, Pvnc" — which the narrator translates as "to protect and serve", but which would more accurately translate to "make my day, punk", with some leeway on pvnc and punk.
- In Feet of Clay, several of the Golems (golems originally stemming from Hebrew stories) have Yiddish names. One golem's name was "Crazy" and one's was "Cloth used for cleaning."
- Pratchett slipped a subversion of this trope into a Monstrous Regiment footnote, involving the language of birds. It points out that the beauty of birdsong can lose its luster for ornithologists, who know for a fact that they're overhearing birds dissing and/or making passes at one another.
- A number of 19th-century Russian novels, such as Anna Karenina, include random bursts of French from certain characters. Learning French was considered part of a "respectable" education for the Russian nobility at the time, so it was a marker of status for people to be able to converse freely in French. In particular, it's used when well-off characters discuss things they don't want the servants to know.
- Just a minor one, but Darkness Visible has an exchange in French during a scene in St Petersburg which is never translated. Also a sort of Genius Bonus - Not everyone knows that the language of high society in Russia at that time was French, not Russian.
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, with its bilingual Dominican protagonist and frequent lapses into slang, is definitely more enjoyable for the bilingual reader, in this troper's opinion.
- In Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code, Butler reveals his first name to Artemis when he thinks he's going to die. His name is Domovoi, which is the name of a household guardian spirit in Russian. Definitely very apt for him.
- The book states this explicitly, though, so it is not reserved to readers who know Russian, and more of a Meaningful Name.
- Philip K. Dick's VALIS provides us with blatant Author Avatar Horselover Fat, which a student of languages will tell you is "Philip Dick", in that "Philip" comes from Greek Phillipos, "Lover of horses"*
phil="love" (neither sexual nor Platonic) + (h)ippos, "horse" , and "Dick" is German for "fat", as in "thick". Subverted, in that Dick admits this in all of this in about three pages...and in relatively short order introduces Philip K. Dick as a character.
- Letters Back To Ancient China has many. One example: The German unions are mentioned, which are all named "IG ...". This abbreviation can be pronounced like Mandarin for "give once", but Kao-tai writes that they rather should be named "take ten thousand times".
Live Action TV
Music
- "Soy un perdedor" from "Loser" by Beck. Spanish for "I am a loser".
- His song Hotwax has the following chorus: Yo soy disco quebrado / Yo tengo chicle en el cerebro. It translates to "I am a broken record / I have bubblegum in my brain."
- "The Macaronic Carol" by Shari Ajemian and Sarah Newcomb alternates between lines in English and Latin. The English lines are all about how much fun it is to carol gaily in fields of snow; the Latin lines are things like "my feet hurt", "it's cold", and "I want to go home".
- Once Bjorn Ulvaeus began writing all the ABBA lyrics himself, foreign languages began cropping up every now and then, like French ("Voulez-Vous"), Spanish ("Put On Your White Sombrero"), and Latin ("The Piper"). He's continued the trend to this day, including writing Swedish/English and Swedish/Sioux songs in Kristina från Duvemala (one of which contains a bilingual fart joke). Not to mention that English is his second language to begin with, so...
- Rammstein, a German band, has slipped other languages into their songs plenty of times: "Moskau" has Russian, "Pussy", "Amerika", and "Stirb Nicht Vor Mir" are half German, half English, "Amour" and "Frühling in Paris" has some French, and "Te Quiero Puta" is entirely in Spanish.
- Knorkator, another German metal band, has one song entirely in Thai. However, the lyrics are entirely about Alf Ator's then girlfriend and now wife telling how she was asked to write a song in her native Thai and she has no idea what that song should be about. But it doesn't really matter since nobody in the band or the audience will understand it anyway.
- The band Disturbed's song "Stupify" has a few Hebrew words in it, such as "Tefached" which means "Be afraid" with lead singer, David Draiman, in the next phrase asking in English "Darlin', don't be afraid".
- The rapid stream of Spanish in the middle of "Taco Grande" by "Weird Al" Yankovic translates approximately to: "Good evening, sir. Welcome to Enrico's Casa de Salsa. We have many delicious entrees. If I might recommend the burning Hell chicken, very delicious. Your eyes will burn up, your stomach will be on fire, you'll be in the bathroom for a week, do you understand what I'm saying, stupid silly gringo?!"
- The song "Die Eier Von Satan" by Tool features German lyrics delivered in an angry tirade over a cheering audience and grinding industrial music. The translated lyrics are actually a simple recipe for hash brownies. The lyrics also feature a German pun. The name of the brownies are "The eggs of Satan," with "eggs" being German slang for "testicals." The recipe, as the speaker repeatedly proclaims to massive cheers, includes no actual eggs.
- The first album by the Italian rock band Elio e le Storie Tese is titled "Elio samaga hukapan kariyana turu", which means "Let's all merrily fart and cum with Elio" in Tamil. The title of their later album "Italyan, rum casusu čikti" was taken from the headlines of a newspaper from Cyprus and means "It turned out that the 'Italian' was a Greek spy".
- Arcade Fire's "Une Annee Sans Lumiere" switches between English and the French of the title. Natural enough since they have at least one native French speaker in the band.
- There's some unexpected and untranslated French toward the end of Judas Priest's 1977 song "Saints in Hell": "Abbatoir! Abbatoir! Mon Dieu, quel horreur!" ("Slaughterer! Slaughterer! My God, what horror!")
- The P!nk song Fingers features the singer screaming "Me vengo! Me vengo!" at one point in the song. The phrase translates roughly to "I'm coming! I'm coming!".
Professional Wrestling
- Believe it or not, there was actually a feud based around the Bilingual Bonus; there was a brief period of time where WWE Divas champion Maryse (from Montreal, Quebec, Canada) would come up to Gail Kim and talk about how great a wrestler she is and how she respects her, etc., and then say something in French. This went on for a few weeks until Kim attacked Maryse, revealed she was fluent in French and that she had known the entire time that Maryse was trash-talking her to her face.
- There's a possible variation in this Ring of Honor promo preceding a Montreal show, as Colt Cabana requests the help of Kevin Steen (also from Quebec) in translating "I can't wait to party with everybody in Montreal, ROH style" — what Kevin tells him is "j'ai couché avec ma mère hier" ("I slept with my mom yesterday"). Colt seemingly acts oblivious to the joke other than saying 'sa' instead of 'ma', but Kevin immediately realizes that Colt just switched "my" with "his".
Tabletop Games
- In the card game Chez Geek, the flavor text for the card "Caesar's Gallic Wars" says, in Latin, "Gaul is now divided into three parts. I believe Elvis is alive."
Theater
- W.S.Gilbert wrote a Latin chorus for the monks that march mysteriously through the opening song of ''The Mountebanks''. However, the lyrics are, in fact, grumbling about how awful it is to be a monk. The Mountebanks is from 1892.
- In the musical Spring Awakening most of the adults' names are puns or phrases in German. (ex: Herr Sonnenstich, Herr Knochenbruch, Fraulein Knueppeldick, Fraulein Grossebustenhalter...) The play is even worse, with every adult character who isn't a parent having a name like this.
- In The Musical of The Wedding Singer, as part of the finale, the characters recap the entire show, including one who sings a verse in Filipino. The next singer's verse, appropriately, is "For those of you who speak Filipino, you know that things ended up the way they should."
- The French class scene in The History Boys. It's completely untranslated unless they decide to put something in the programme, and dear lord, it's hysterical. Particularly when Dakin drops his trousers for reasons entirely incomprehensible to an audience that doesn't understand French...
- Princess Katherine's language lesson and the courting scene in Shakespeare's Henry V both contain untranslated French. The latter is funny mostly for King Henry's unsubtle mangling of the language. The former is basically a scene-long build-up to two predictable and filthy sound puns.
Video Games
- Final Fantasy V has an enemy called "Azulmagia". His name consists of two Spanish works, "azul"="blue", "magia"="magic". Guess what he uses against your party?
- Final Fantasy X contains the "Hymn of the Fayth"/"Song of Prayer"; its lyrics seem like nonsense, but if you write the lyrics in kana horizontally then read it vertically it's appropriate Japanese.
- The FPS Medal of Honor features some funny conversation between enemies. They are spoken in German without subtitles. One of them features a meta-joke in which a soldier wonders aloud whether he is real or a character in a work of fiction.
- Resident Evil 4 features enemies that talk amongst themselves in Spanish. This was explicitly done in order to make them seem more alien from the perspective of the player; the main character is presumably supposed to be unable to understand them (which is weird, as a government agent who's been under intensive training for six years should be expected to know a few other languages), but a knowledgeable player is able to gain some additional information from listening to them. Hispanic players can find this helpful: every time a farmer yells "¡Detrás de ti, imbécil!", you have to turn around and shoot, because they're literally saying "Behind you, you idiot!".
- The circa-1993 Finnish game Stardust named its Distressed Damsel after a local brand of margarine and the final dungeon after the makers' hometown.
- In World of Warcraft, with in-game languages. Every character knows two languages: their faction language and their racial language (except for orcs and humans, whose languages are used as faction languages for the Horde and Alliance respectively). Since some enemy NPCs in the game speak exclusively racial languages, only players of the corresponding race will have the Enemy Chatter rendered into English via Translation Convention — others will see gibberish.
- Hostile Troll NPCs in the Dwarvish starting area will shout out "Don't be stealin my weed" in Trollish.
- "LOL" (Laugh out loud) when spoken by a Horde to Alliance always appears as "KEK". "BUR" is what the Alliance appear to say when speaking "LOL" to Horde.
- This is either a Shout Out to StarCraft, where Korean players dominate the field often celebrating their victories by LO Ling the losers (and LOL analog is "kekekekeke" in Korean), or just a very funny coincidence.
- Starcraft's Expansion Pack's teaser movie was filled with Latin chanting about preparing for battle and praying for victory, as well as even-more-ominous French chanting about how victory is sure—just as the soldiers are callously abandoned by The Cavalry to be devoured by the Zerg.
- In Portal 2, Wheatley has a bit of Spanish dialogue. The Spanish translates to "You are using the translation software incorrectly. Please consult the manual."
- The arcade game Metal Slug 2 starts out in a Middle-Eastern desert town filled with Arabic signs. At the end of the level, where the first boss is fought, two massive banners dominate the street in the background, stating (in Arabic) "I have diarrhea" and "I need medicine."
- Freedom Fighters had some odd and/or awkward Russian-to-English moments. "First Hitting Brigade, GO!" being probably the champion. The funniest, however, was probably a poster, in parody of the famous Uncle Sam Wants You posters, stating that "The Red Army offers you wonderful opportunity." Small Cyrillic print in the bottom left corner of said poster revealed that said opportunity mainly consists of "Russian vodka".
- Speakers of most Germanic languages except English will note much earlier that there seems to be a relationship between Naomi Hunter and Frank Jaeger, as both family names mean the same. She was raised as his sister. But the truth is a lot more complicated.
- The code word for the Patriots in Metal Gear Solid 2 is "La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo" is a lot less silly in Japanese, as it is the last (complete) column of the Japanese letter system and would be similar to "XYZ" in latin-based alphabets.
- The Commander Keen computer games featured a language named the "Standard Galactic Alphabet" that was just coded symbols corresponding to English letters. In the first game, you'd run across signs that, when decoded, said things like "This is neat" and "Behold the holy pogo stick". The coded alphabet remained consistent throughout the entire series.
- The Legend of Kyrandia: Book 2: The Hand of Fate — the abominable snowman speaks backwards English (rendered phonetically in the screen text) and his utterances fit the action. "Hey, you changed your clothes!" "It's all yours." "You might hurt yourself!" "You missed your chance."
- Actually, the voice files were reversed, but the text used a Cesare cipher where the vowels where the first five letters of the alphabet, and the consonants filling the remaining alphabet. Using the alchemy wand on the yeti would have the yeti explain it to you.
- Hitman: Blood Money has newspapers reporting on your deeds after each level, many in foreign languages. The foreign ones are full of jokes. For instance, in Spanish one says "No tengo ninguna pista que ha escrito", which is incorrect grammar for "I have no clue what I've written." (It should be "No tengo ni idea de lo que acabo de escribir.") Another, oddly, says "Read a book or play outside; to play a game will only make you dumber."
- Just Cause 2. Many names of locales in Panau are rooted in Indonesian or Malay. Most appear to be mundane and crude translations, but a handful of names were obviously conceived for comedic effect, such as the "Awan Cendawan Power Plant" or "Kem Gunung Belakang Patah".
- Jade Empire features a pair of guard golems who can be disabled if you use the correct password. The password is 'xiaohua', which, if spoken with the correct tones, simply means 'joke' in Mandarin Chinese.
- In the original Call of Duty, in one mission a German radio operator instructs you in English to surrender and promises that you won't be harmed, right in between repeated calls in German to the soldiers to take no prisoners.
- The later Call of Duty games in general seem to have been designed to make Russian speakers uncomfortable. In one of the Modern Warfare games, the guards during a stealth mission seem to be programmed to announce the player's exact location no matter where you're hidden. In Black Ops, some guards off handedly mention the extremely severe mechanical problems with a helicopter you are expected to steal and how they will be fixed very soon if you wait.
- The later Elder Scrolls games contain a book called "N'Gasta Kvata Kvakis", which is found in many Necromancers' lairs. The book appears to be gibberish. In reality, it's slightly modified Esperanto. The translation is just the description of an Esperanto newsletter.
- In Sam and Max: Reality 2.0 Bosco revealed the name of his "safe" bank as bancolavadero.com, in Spanish "lavadero" is a water sink used to wash clothes and the popular name for shady businesses which do money laundering.
- Thanks to its setting, the Monkey Island series is rife with this. Just to give an example, one of the central antagonists in Tales of Monkey Island is named Marquis De Singe ('singe' being French for 'monkey', which Guybrush lampshades by calling him "De Monkey" in the fourth chapter).
- The manual for Command and Conquer: Red Alert contains lines of Morse code. If decoded, these hint at the existence and content of the secret "ant missions".
- In Muramasa: The Demon Blade, the female PC is a princess, in a peach colored kimono. Her name, Momohime, means 'Peach Princess'. Peach Princess, eh?.
- In Deus Ex Human Revolution, coincidental conversations in Heng Sha are spoken with accurate Mandarin Chinese.
- Not really a bonus, per se, but if you play Crysis on the hardest difficulty, the game turns off Translation Convention and the enemy soldiers start speaking Korean.
- In Warcraft 3 The Beastmaster can summon a bear familiar called Misha. It is the affectionate Russian word for "bear" or "beary".
- Fear Effect. The first and second game are loaded with untranslated Chinese characters. As an example, the first game begins with a funeral procession, with a picture of a woman being carried as well as a sign that says 名垂千古. In Mandarin Chinese, this says "míng chuí qiān gǔ", and this can be translated as "(Her) name (is) Chui Qiangu". For those who are curious, Chui would be her last name and Qiangu would be her first name.
- Which is wrong because it is an idiom, meaning that her name will live on forever...
- Splinter Cell Chaos Theory has a Japanese gang with a name that translates to "Red Herring", thus hinting at the later developments.
[After Sam asks for a translation]
Civilian: It's a kind of fish. A small, silvery fish.
Sam: You mean a herring?
Civilian: Yes! YES! That's it! That's the word! Red Herring!
Web Comics
- Walkyverse. Dumbing Of Age gives us Marcie, who is mute and speaks in ASL.
- This strip of Irregular Webcomic! for Quebecois French speakers is ostensibly an extended joke about a mountie, a lumberjack etc etc etc walk into a bar, but the French segments are the author commenting about how he's speaking in French and how he needs someone to give him dialogue to translate.
- Irregular Webcomic! author David Morgan-Mar and others had a half-baked idea to launch a site dedicated to half-baked ideas called "mezzacotta". Mezza cotta is Italian for half-baked.
- Unshelved used Braille once. It translates to "soon the full text of every overdue comic strip will be available on our website so that everybody can enjoy them." *
It's Grade 2 Braille, which uses every symbol and a bunch of contractions.
- Rock Paper Cynic contains a strip that, according to the author, contrasts black humour with infantile joy by exploiting the Language Barrier between French and English. The strip has two separate scripts, running side by side, one in each language. The English is innocent and fairy tale like, while the French veers into darker territory.
- Specifically, the French story goes: "Bertrand was a blueberry. He was suspicious of the English-speaking population. He was a bit racist. He prayed to the gods to massacre his enemies, and one day... he saw them all die."
- Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki has this as well. The runes on Yuuki's belt? A contraceptive spell. Just remember that Yuuki is a gender changed, magical girl who gets into more "situations"" than the average person, and this could manifest as Fridge Brilliance.
- Homestuck has an interesting case with The Troll alphabet. It's actually upside-down Daedric Alphabet from The Elder Scrolls. The first name suggestion translates as "Turdodor Fuckball." The "real" name, however, translates as "Trollplanet" which is an accurate description of the world... but which makes the caption a blatant lie, because it claims the guess was exactly right... and that the name of the world is Alternia. The attempted insulting name for Karkat translates as "Bulgereek Nookstain". During their fight scenes, the word "GRIEF" appears instead of the kids' STRIFE.
- This xkcd has a Bilingual Bonus in the alt-text in Lojban. What that Bilingual Bonus is will have to remain a mystery until someone bothers putting a translation here.
- Bilingual Bonus: In the beginning of Issue #12 of The Dreamer, Benjamin Tallmadge says to Nathan Hale in Latin, \"Poena absentiae non excusandae probatio collegii dies quinque et admonitio publica est. Decem pro furciferis Linoniae.\"
The punishment for unexcused absence is five days of college probation and a public admonition. Ten for Linonian rogues.
- In this strip of Penny Arcade, the Mandalorian roughly translates to: Train your sons to be strong, but your daughters to be stronger, learn mandoa fool. Now hands up how many had to use Google translate or similar to get that?
- A minor one, but in this Darths & Droids comic, the title is in binary. When translated to ascii, it reads "Sunset."
- The Wotch gives us the character Ivan Bezdomny. His last name is the Polish word for homeless.
Web Original
- In ARCHON, non-human first names tend to be words in another language. Notably elven names are Welsh and orkish names are German. Overlaps with Meaningful Name.
- In the Whateley Universe, the story "Quoth the Ninja, Nevermore!" has a Bilingual Bonus. The superpowered ninjas raiding the school (as a Yama Dojo graduation exercise) form a Five-Man Band, and their names are all jokes in Japanese. Their given names are all types of food, as in tons of anime, while their last names all have hidden meanings.
- While RAKSA of Chaos Fighters: Chemical Warriors-RAKSA is the nickname of Rakion Kalsa, Malay speakers can tell that this novel revolves around mercury.
- Mystery Guitar Man's first line in almost all of his videos is in Portuguese, some are specific references only Brazilians will understand. And while there are English subtitles in his videos, the line in Portuguese is never translated nor written.
- Wikipedia. Especially if you know two languages whose major using countries (English defaults to U.S., obviously) got noticeable ideological differences. When in a punkish mood you can have fun just by looking up on both languages almost any article related to these areas. The source of fun is that they both contain The Neutral Point Of View. And are claimed to be more precise than Britannica, remember? Both at the same time, obviously.
Western Animation
- Atlantis: The Lost Empire has one Bilingual Parental Bonus: The lech-leaning engineer asks one of the Atlantean woman "Voulez vous couchez avec moi, ce soir?" ("Would you sleep with me tonight?"), a phrase which is also often said in the song "Lady Marmalade".
- In the South Park episode "Good Times With Weapons" the kids are playing with the weapons and imagine themselves as anime characters, complete with a song in Japanese made by Trey Parker (who speaks fluent Japanese), "Let's Fighting Love". The song also has several odd statements in Gratuitous English (including the titular line), and most of the song is profane (but grammatically correct) nonsense and the singer admitting how bad the song and his English are. (You can find a translation here.)
- Japanese jokes aplenty in "Chinpokomon" - Chinpoko is Japanese for "very small penis."
- Another episode featured a fictional videogame console, the Okama Gamesphere. "Okama" being Japanese slang for "gay man."
- In "Chickenlover", the alphabet poster above the school blackboard reads "DiOsMiOhAnMaTaDoHaKeNnYbAsTaRdOs", which is Spanish for "Oh my God, they killed Kenny, you bastards".
- In "Osama Bin Laden Has Farty Pants", the Afghan children speak fluent Persian (with Iranian accents), most of which can be guessed from context. Includes the line "God! They killed Keivan" when the Afghan Kenny-analogue is killed.
- Also in Pinkeye, the button the Cosmonauts accidentally press to crash the Mir space station is labelled "hoopsie" in Cyrillic script— a possible transliteration of either "oopsie" or "whoopsie".
- In Futurama when Amy Wong gets mad, she will often speak Chinese in a tone implying that she's swearing. However, she's actually saying very innocuous phrases and just using an angry tone.
- Binary code is also used with Bender here and there; among other things, his apartment reads '$' and a binary message in blood is the number 666.
- In one episode of the new (2010) series, the crew travels in time and Prof. Farnsworth takes a stop to kill Adolf Hitler. Just before Farnsworth's death ray blows him up, Hitler is yelling in an official speech: "Betrachten Sie meinen Schnurrbart!" "Look at my moustache!"
- One episode of The Fairly OddParents shows snails being eaten at a cafe in downtown Paris; the name of the cafe is "Cafe Abattoir", a French loanword.
- In Hey Arnold!, Mr. Kokoshka has a Meaningful Name in Russian—Kokashka translates to feces or "shithead," which precisely describes him.
- Beast Wars has Cybertronix, a simple substitution cypher. Sometimes it's used for gibberish, sometimes it's plot relevant, and sometimes it's just used for in-jokes and Getting Crap Past the Radar.
- In the episode "Here There Be Dwarves" of The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy the dwarves shout "Lave sus Manos!" as a battle cry. Those who understand Spanish knows it translate to "Wash your hands".
- In the episode "My Peeps", while Grim is zapping Billy's eyes to try and fix them, Billy briefly sees Grim and Mandy in an Animesque style, and Mandy says "His eyes aren't fixed yet" in Japanese.
- In The Critic, Vlada's restaurant is named L'ane Riche, which is French for "The Wealthy Jackass."
- Family Guy episode "McStroke" has an Italian guy tells Peter he is crazy for faking Italian and in "Road to Europe" the German tour guide tells everyone on the tour to shut up.
- All the signs in Asiantown are nonsense. The "Chinese Takeout" has the exact same English words written below it in Japanese letters, and one street sign says "I love you". Other store signs say "1234567" or "Monday"
- In one episode of American Dad, Steve is deceived by Roger to think he has been accepted in Hogwarts (yeah, that Hogwarts) really Roger just sent him with drug dealers, one of them told Steve "Lavate las manos" which he believed to be a spell, actually was "Wash your hands" in Spanish.
- Phineas and Ferb: The show's creator voices the German character Dr. Doofenshmirtz, and knows German himself, which has actually led to them getting to say, "Perry the Platypus, you scared the shit out of me!" in German. I'm not sure how that was corrected in the German dub...
- It was. In fact, the German dub even toned down a line where Doofenshmirtz told Perry: "You haven't got a tail anymore! Now you're no match for me!". The German word for "Tail" is also a slang term for "Penis".
- Done in Adventure Time. Lady Rainicorn, Jake and Finn are sitting together, and telling jokes. There is a significant problem here, as Rainicorn speaks only Korean. Rainicorn is asked to tell a joke. Her reply causes Jake to blush, and he quickly makes the excuse that there is a translation barrier. Her 'joke', translated, is "Remember when we ran naked through that field? That farmer was so offended!"
- Sort of inevitable with Más y Menos from Teen Titans, twins who speak only in Spanish (most of the time, they spout long streams of Spanish without subtitles). Amid one of their rants, they say the word "piss". They had to correct it for the Spanish dub.
- In Pasila, the drawing room of an evil aristocrats' club bears the Vulgate latin for "The tongue of the just is as choice silver: but the heart of the wicked is nothing worth."
- One episode of Kevin Spencer has the title character riding with his parents on a train in Quebec. Percy notices a sign on the wall that says "Defense de fumer", and wonders what it means. Anastasia replies that she thinks it means "fasten your seatbelt." What it actually means in French is "No Smoking", something Kevin and his family obviously wouldn't obey even if they knew what it meant.
- In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, when Greasy encounters the bear trap in Jessica's Victoria's Secret Compartment, he shrieks what sounds like gibberish. Spanish speakers who've seen this scene claim he's actually shouting "la mierda mi chingadaq la mano", which means "Shit, my fucking hand!"
- In Ed, Edd n' Eddy, the evil sisters who torment the main characters are called the Kanker sisters. Kanker is Dutch for cancer, and it's the worst kind of thing that you can swear in our language. In one episode you can clearly see the name "Kanker Club" for a treehouse. Unedited. And since club means the same in Dutch as it does in English...well, that's bad.
- Bubbles of The Powerpuff Girls has the ability to speak Spanish and has done so in some episodes. For instance in "Ice Sore" she tells Pablo "Provoque el niño", meaning loosely "Move it boy".
- In a Mysterio episode of The Spectacular Spider-Man, he is chanting in Latin to summon various spells/illusions. Translated, he is saying things that make sense for the sleep and lightning spells, but for the disappearing spell he chants "Thank you for not smoking", then "I believe that Elvis is still alive" for the dragon-summoning spell, and "I can't get no satisfaction" for the Homunculi-summoning spell.
- In the episode of Robot Chicken entitled "Federated Resources", Cory Feldman has a shirt that reads "ばか (Baka)" which means "Idiot" in Japanese.
Real Life
- Because sometimes gratuitous foreign languages are necessary, German talkshow host Harald Schmidt decided that he and his whole team would not say a word in their native language for a whole show and speak French instead, making the whole thing one long surreal bilingual bonus. It's made even funnier for native French speakers by the fact that Schmidt speaks pretty well, makes pun on hit songs and at one point mimes extracts from a traditional French puppet show. Of course, the German audience was somewhat less pleased.
- After conquering of Sindh in Pakistan (despite having received orders not to do so), Sir Charles James Napier reported the news to London in a telegraph that simply said: PECCAVI, Latin for "I have sinned".
- Similarly, when Lord Clyde conquered the city of Lucknow (also in India), he is said to have telegraphed home NUNC FORTUNATUS SUM (I am in luck now).
- In German the word Burgermeister basically means 'Mayor' making this guy◊ the Cheeseburgermeister.
- This falls somewhat flat on account of the umlaut - it's Bürgermeister. In any case, the joke doesn't work in German speaking countries.
- Only when written. When spoken, the English word "burger" sounds almost identical to the German "Bürger". In fact, the pun even better because of the umlaut.
- The baddie Burgermeister Meisterburger in Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town suddenly makes a whole lot more sense.
- The Burgermeister semi-pun goes even further and is the name of a chain of hamburger restaurants in San Francisco.
- In a large waterpark in Texas, the giftshop sign reads "gift haus" which translates from German to English as "poison house". This is a notorious English-German false cognate. It actually descends from the same word and originally meant the same, but was used as euphemism for "poison" in the Middle-Ages, which remained as the only meaning in contemporary German Language.
- The software company Piriform makes freeware cleanup tools, including Recuva, a tool for recovering lost files after you accidentally delete them. Piriform is Latin for "pear-shaped", British slang for Gone Horribly Wrong. (The company logo is also pear-shaped, confirming that this is intentional.)
- A common mistake for both English- and Portuguese-speakers learning Spanish is to use the adjective "embarazado/a" to mean "embarrassed," when it is most often used to mean "pregnant." The proper response when a novice says, "Estoy embarazado/a" is "¡Felicidades!"
- What's worse is that 'pregunta' (question) is a false cognate as well, so it's easy to get screwed both ways. Spanish is full of weird cases like that.
- The Other Wiki has this.
- In late 19th century / early 20th century, it was quite common for (European) scholars to speak several scientifically important languages ("scientifically important" in that most of the scientific literature at that time was published in these languages). These languages usually included French, Italian, English, Latin and German and since the authors at the time assumed that all their readers knew those languages, they usually didn't bother translating quotes in those languages. (A bit like Umberto Eco in the literature example above.) This can lead to some frustration when a modern-day student has to read those texts.
- In the 2010 Winter Olympics, figure skater Johnny Weir would communicate with his coach almost entirely in Russian. After the final, his coach was shown talking to him and the American news casters translated it as words of encouragement - she was calling him her little idiot.
- To be fair, calling someone your little idiot is a term of endearment in Russian.
- When the Toyota MR2 was exported to France the "2" had to be dropped to prevent the car from being known as "Le Toyota Merduex" which roughly translates as "The Shitty Toyota" or the "Toyota (is) Shitty". Although they averted this in France, you can bet the Canadians had a laugh about this whenever they were at their local Toyota dealership.
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