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It was not really Eton that he mentioned, for the College of Blessed Mary was not established until 1440, but it was a place of the same sort. Also they were drinking Metheglyn, not Port, but by mentioning the modern wine it is easier to give you the feel.
The place? The signposts are in English, so that we may read them more easily. But the place is in The Twilight Zone.
When a group of people whose native language is not English are together, away from any English-speakers, the audience may nonetheless hear them speaking perfect English. This is not a case of Translator Microbes.
In these cases, we are meant to assume that the characters "really are" speaking their own native tongue, and it is being translated purely for our benefit (or the benefit of the casting director who is then free to hire English-speaking actors), a sort of designed-in dubbing.
It is not strictly necessary for there to be no English speakers about; we can sometimes infer from context that they too are speaking a different language. (As in the MacGyver episode "A Prisoner of Conscience", unless we are to believe that the entire population of a Russian state psychiatric hospital speaks English as their preferred language). In such cases, it can be difficult or impossible to tell whether it is the Translation Convention or Translator Microbes at work.
This also works for, for example, Japanese in anime series.
In some cases, the actors will begin speaking in the characters' native language, then perform a switch-over to English. This is usually accompanied by some sort of camera-move to cue the audience in to the fact that the characters should still be assumed to be speaking in their native language. This technique was used in The Hunt For Red October (see below for context). Also common is characters speaking their own language when addressing English-speaking members of the cast, but accented English at all other times, giving the curious impression that foreigners only speak their own language when they think an English speaker is listening. Black-and-white war movie Germans are particularly fond of doing this.
If done in poor taste, the characters may retain ridiculous accents, resulting in giving the impression that they have no other language, Just A Stupid Accent.
When the actors speak with English or other British accents for effect, despite the story being set in times past, they are speaking The Queens Latin. For example, every second film adaptation of Shakespeare's plays.
Naturally, this also happens when translating works into other languages. However, languages left untranslated in the original may still be left untranslated in the translation. (Of course, in literature, this can cause problems if the language left untranslated in the original is the language being translated into, though translating that into the original language works. On TV, you can just use gibberish.)
Most works of fantasy operate under the Translation Convention, given that English isn't exactly the Common Tongue (pun intended) In cases like these, the language being spoken will occasionally be namedropped for the reader's benefit (especially in scenes where more than one language is being spoken).
Sometimes—despite the characters supposedly not speaking English—puns, jokes and wordplay are present that only work in English. Sometimes there's a handwaving explanation that equivalents have been replaced by the translator.
See also Aliens Speaking English. Compare Bilingual Dialogue.
Examples
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Anime
- Presumably, the Tachikomas in Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex are being translated for the viewers' benefit while actually communicating electronically (since, in the first Tachikoma Special, one of the Tachikomas suggests that they should all use language, while the viewers hear them "speaking" Japanese).
- In the English-dubbed version of Evangelion, Asuka still says her Eva unit doesn't understand Shinji, because he's speaking/thinking in Japanese rather than German. Her German, naturally, goes untranslated.
- This troper notes that said Japanese in the English dub was, naturally, in English rather than Japanese. Evidently a convention of the genre, at least among dubs that don't pretend everyone is actually speaking English.
- In Black Lagoon, all the characters "spoke" in Japanese, despite being an international cast; it was assumed that they were actually speaking English. Then things got complicated in a specific arc where they visited Japan: the dialogue would switch back and forth between the English they were actually speaking and the Japanese they weren't. The general rule seemed to be English when they were speaking to those who couldn't understand it and Japanese when they could (the audience only understood when someone else did), but the pattern was broken in both directions several times.
- At least 90% of the dialogue in Monster is translated for the (Japanese) viewers' benefit from German. There are also near-singular cases of translation from English and Latin.
- Since the characters come from all over Europe (with a Japanese protagonist), there are a handful of confusing scenes where the translation convention suddenly switches from Japanese-for-German to Japanese-for-English, or Japanese-for-Czech. One episode actually does this repeatedly, with the audience's perspective switching back and forth between German speakers and English speakers who are traveling together.
- And lets spoof that up a bit by reading the manga in german.
- In Mai-Otome, nearly all text that appears on screen (including newspapers, computer screens, and diaries) is in Gratuitous English, while the spoken dialogue is (obviously) in Japanese. It is never mentioned explicitly what the "real" language spoken in this far-future setting is. Sometimes it leads to bizarre language-specific dialogue that wouldn't make much sense if the language was indeed English, like Mashiro mentioning that she was named after (the Japanese name of) Fumi's GEM, which is called "Pure White Diamond" in English. Not to mention characters occasionally slipping into speaking English...
- In Death Note, the scenes at which Interpol convenes and speaks with a British detective, as well as Near's dealings with the American SPK and Mello's conversations with the US Mafia are all presented in Japanese; presumably, they're actually speaking English.
- However, in the live-action movie, Lind L. Tailor, L's decoy, was voiced by an American, while a Japanese translator made a voice-over.
- This is how it was done in the manga as well, although only the voice-over is shown.
- This is assumed to be in effect for Wammy's House as well, unless we are to believe that all the residents of an orphanage in England speak Japanese as their default language.
- In Zero No Tsukaima, the first episode involves the lead hero falling into the heroine's world, and isn't able to understand anything they say until she accidentally uses a translation spell. In the dub, they meet and ask each other what language the other is speaking in...in perfect English.
- To their credit they represented this by having Saito speak with an echo effect applied to his voice until Louise spelled him, at least in the Japanese version. It had to be Saito even though he's the actual Japanese speaker because just imagine how annoying it would have been to have the entire cast apart from him using the echo effect for the entire episode up to that point.
- They were both speaking perfect Japanese to each other in the original too. Saito wonders if they're speaking English for a second, but realizes they're not. Apparently they're speaking French.
- Though this never happened in the original light novels. Apparently magic Belgium speaks Japanese.
- Got kind of confusing in the Samurai Champloo episode "Baseball Blues", which had Americans speaking English. It was easy to know what language was which in the Japanese episode—the Americans spoke English with Japanese subtitles (and the Americans' interpreter speaks Japanese with a laughably bad accent)—but in the English dub, everybody speaks English. The Japanese subtitles were kept. I assume that's supposed to make an English viewer understand the Americans speak English and/or they couldn't remove them.
- Wolfs Rain takes place in The Future during The End in an unspecified part of the world, but all written text is shown to be in Russian.
- Azumanga Daioh had its difficulties when dubbed into English, since the main classroom scenes take place ... in an English class. The manga had less difficulty, with different typefaces (or the artist's attempts at writing in English), but for the anime series, Yukari goes from an English teacher to a 'language' teacher, with the English-spoken lines in the original usually being turned to French or Spanish. Incongruous when the 'language' teacher has difficulty with talking to a German, or the fact that all the non-Japanese text is in English, or that the textbooks are English books.
- Most ironically, the teacher's English in the original Japanese dub is actually terrible. That may count as an 'extra' joke, though, given her character.
- More accurately, she speaks, apparently, fluent English with an extremely thick accent, as evidenced by the fact that she is shown conversing comfortably with an American tourist.
- Pera pera!
- In the Filipino dub, since most Filipinos speak fluent English as most of their audience, this conversation had been reduced to a 'blah!blah!blah!' to provide suspense.
- Every Gundam series features English text (with varying degrees of quality), but the characters themselves speak Japanese - except, of course, in the dubbed versions. It's generally assumed that English is the lingua franca for all seven universes because, as one Gundam Wing fansite pointed out, it doesn't make much sense for a Chinese woman to speak to a group of Arabs in Japanese.
- In Origin, The Federation is apparently bilingual, with most things being labelled in both English & Russian.
- Similiarly, all printed material in the Macross universe is shown on screen in English (often Surprisingly Good English), and it is assumed that, especially after the first series, English is the spoken language in the context of the show, even though it is always produced in Japanese.
- The manga for Mahou Sensei Negima provided an elegant solution to the problem of how to imply to the reader that some characters were speaking in English while others were speaking in Japanese. Japanese dialogue was written as normal but English dialogue was written backwards, that is, left to right - as one would expect to see English written. The English Translations provided their own solution by putting the words that are spoken in English (as opposed to being translated to it) in a different font.
- Blood Plus features this trope hard. Over the course of Walking The Earth, the characters go from Okinawa, to Vietnam, to Russia, to France, to England and finally to America. Granted some of the characters are old enough to have learned all the languages, but it boggles the mind to wonder how two not particularly intelligent highschool students like Kai and Mao know all of them.
- Not to mention the United States soldiers speaking to one another in Japanese when no other Japanese characters are present.
- The Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha series has a bizarre partial application of this trope. Humans and familiars always speak Japanese, but their Devices speak either English or German depending on whether they are Mid-Childa or Belkan. This results in a number of conversations where one side is Engrish and the other Japanese.
- In Noir, the main characters speak so many different languages fluently, that it can be hard to tell what language they are actually speaking at a given time: Most of the series is set in France, but when they go on a mission they speak whatever language is there because that's what assassins do so they don't look suspicious. But they still always just speak Japanese for convenience.
- In general, a lot of anime that take place in more western settings like Gunslinger Girl or Madlax have the characters speak the language of their viewers for convenience, but inevitably causes erupt confusion when other languages come into the picture.
- Some of the foreign students in the School Rumble manga got their speaking parts translated into Gratuitous English as an attempt for Western readers to recognize who's the one speaking Gratuitous Japanese.
- In The Five Star Stories, signs & other things are labelled in Engrish, though everybody seems to be speaking Japanese (or whatever language it's translated into). The use of English lettering is particularily odd, as the people are aliens who evolved to be identical to humans apparently through sheer coincidence & have no connection whatsoever to Earth. Stranger still, the language of the ancient, mystical Farus Di Kanarn civilization is rendered as French. When Mugumica recites a poem from there it's written bilingually, but earlier when Lachesis changes into her final form for the first time & begins speaking it, it is left untranslated.
- It's about 11,000 years in the future, so it might not be Translation Convention for the text.
- Another oddity is that Ssizz & presumably the rest of Balanche's "Oriental-Style" Fatimas often have their dialogue left untranslated in English editions.
- Code Geass is a bit strange about this. For the most part, it's blatantly clear that the characters are actually speaking English, though there are some scenes where the true language is Japanese (and a few in Chinese, and possibly German), and a number of characters are implied to be bilingual. On the other hand, Britannian soldiers use the phrases "Yes, my lord!" and "Yes, your highness!" in English, even in the original Japanese version.
- The same thing happens in the English dub; in this case, the dialogue occasionally has a character say -san to indicate when they're actually speaking Japanese.
- According to Word of God, all the characters in D.Gray-Man are speaking English.
- In One Piece, the characters' names and the background text indicate that everyone is actually speaking English.
- Since Chrono Crusade is set in America, it's safe to assume everyone's speaking English instead of Japanese.
- In Princess Tutu there's only a small monologue in German, but almost all of the on-screen text is in the language, implying that the show is set in Germany and the characters are speaking German. (In fact, taken to its logical conclusion, that means neither Ahiru nor Duck is the main character's real name.)
- The same can be assumed for Gunsmith Cats, which is set in 1990's Chicago.
- An odd example towards the end of Blue Seed, which features a number of scenes set within a US Carrier Group. The original apparently had English voice actors, with a Japanese translator speaking in the background. This Troper isn't sure if AD Vision kept the original voices or used new ones, but the Japanese translation can still be heard in the dub.
- In Planetes, despite being presented in Japanese, most of the dialogue is presumably actually in English. In an episode where three of the characters pay a visit to Japan, Hachimaki's mother complements Yuri on how well he speaks Japanese; in the English dub, this let the viewers know that the characters were actually speaking Japanese, similar to the Evangelion example above.
- Shaman King has characters from all over the world (the Japanese hero's Nakama, for instance, includes shamans from China, Germany, and the United States as well as other Japanese people). Somehow, everyone can understand each other.
- Although, you have to consider that most of these shamans had been training for the Shaman Fight for their whole lives, and since it was to be held in Tokyo, they probably learned to speak Japanese as part of their training. There still are several times when this trope would be active, though (namely Chocolove's flashbacks where Americans are conversing amongst themselves in Japanese).
- In Gurren Lagann, all the text is in a made-up alphabet, indicating that the characters are probably speaking a language which does not exist on Earth today (The text, in all meaningful instances, is a cypher for roman characters).
- At one point in Trigun, Vash is shown to be unable to read Japanese, indicating that while the dialogue is presented in that language, it isn't the one the characters are speaking.
- Darker Than Black has Contractors and Dolls from a number of countries, and one, Maki, is supposed to not know Japanese and based upon the type of phrases he is shown studying, is at a rather remedial level in the language. So, you have a character speaking in Japanese about not knowing Japanese. Also notable are Hei's apartment mates who are practically a Five Token Band in terms of diverse nationalities, and even if Tokyo Is The Center Of The Universe, might not be expected to be fluent. While it's never stated that characters are actually speaking English, it seems likely that it would be the common language of characters from differing nationalities, rather than Japanese.
- Considering Baccano! is set in 1930s America, it's probably safe to say that they are not speaking Japanese — although Firo does eventually become fluent in the language in the books
- Furthermore, during flashbacks to the Advena Avis, it's probably safe to say that the characters are speaking French, which would have been the most likely common language for such a wide variety of nationalities in 1711.
- The dub of Ai Yori Aoshi had Mayu use a British accent for speaking English.
- The "Digimon World Tour" part of Digimon Adventure 02 varied between averting the trope and playing it straight. In the US and Australia everybody can understand each other for no reason (which is ACCEPTABLE in the Australia case, as both Iori/Cody and Jou/Joe are very intelligent and probably knew English, but not in the US case, as Daisuke/Davis most likely knows no English and the dozen American children probably don't speak Japanese). In the Mexico case, the only characters they found were a guard (Spanish-speaking) and little Chichos/Rosa, whose Spanish-speak was a plot point (in the group only Ken knew Spanish, and only he could understand her). In the France case, Takeru/TK's grandfather surely knows Japanese, and Catherine addresses in dialogue that she does it too. In the Russia case the trope was averted completely, as the Japanese children couldn't communicate at all with the Russian children. The China case, though, was a complete mess - at first the inability to communicate was the challenge for the Japanese children, but less than a minute later they were perfectly able to understand the Chinese children with no explanation to why. Notice that, in the dub, the cultural shock (except for the Russia case) was replaced by a hurricane of accents.
- Full Metal Alchemist can't seem to decide which language it is. It's spoken in Japanese, everyone writes in English, and it's implied they're all speaking German.
- In Yakitate! Japan guest bakers speak in heavily accented Japanese to Japanese characters but unaccented Japanese amongst themselves, suggesting that they are speaking their own language to each other.
- Kaleido Star takes place at a circus in the U.S., so of course everybody is speaking English even if what you're hearing is Japanese. It gets confusing at times when the two languages cross paths.
- What language is spoken in Last Exile is unclear but it is not set in Japan (or even on Earth), so one would assume it is not Japanese being spoken. The written language is English but using Greek letters (a = Alpha, b = Beta, etc). To a Greek person, the text would not make sense, and to someone who can read English, they would need to decipher the characters first. All numerals are represented by Roman numerals.
- English is what's being spoken in Hellsing. In one of the OVAs Seras uses some Japanese tourists to distract Anderson and Alucard and complains about them... while still speaking 'Japanese' for the benefit of the audience. Presumably, they're still speaking English even though half the people there are Italian.
Comic Books
- Most Comic Books often put "< >" brackets around plain English to represent when a character is talking in another language. This is usually accompanied the first panel it shows up in by an editor note box stating what language they're speaking. This is usually carried over to Webcomics as well, such as Megatokyo, which uses it when characters speak in Japanese.
- Interestingly done in Prince Of Tennis, where this is used when the main character is speaking in English.
- This gets confusing in Yoko Tsuno, because no indication is ever made of the language actually spoken by characters, so that when the actual language spoken is relevant to the plot or discussion, things can get awfully confusing.
- There is a major and concerted effort to do this well in the Tintin series, and it for the most part succeeds. For the few times when the characters are at home instead of around the world, the English translation relocates it from France to England, changing the names of all (French) characters to British ones that fit the theme, and altering a Merovingian burial ground to a Saxon one, among other things.
- Asterix does this well with each language being represented as their own font. Exceptions include Egyptian which consists of a bunch of symbols vaguely resembling hieroglyphics. For humour, certain expletives are left "untranslated", simply being shown as a bunch of symbols.
- The exception being the unremarked-upon distinction between the legionaries' Latin and the villagers' Gaulish - unless of course you're reading a translation into something like Swiss German, when Swiss can be used for Gaulish and the more 'official' Hochdeutsch for Latin.
- The manga 'Club 9' feature a girl who moved from her country town in Akita prefecture to attend college in Tokyo, and work in a high-end hostess club. In the english translation of this manga, all the characters from Akita speak with a country 'hick' accent, and all the characters from Tokyo speak with urban slang. It would be interesting to learn how these language differences are depicted in the original Japanese.
- In Gankutsuou, most of the characters are French. In fact, The Previously is always spoken in French by the Count.
- Presumably, the characters in Nikolai Dante are speaking some form of Russian, but the speach bubbles are always in English.
Film
- In The Hunt For Red October, this is used to great effect. The actors playing Soviets speak to each other in Russian early in the film. Then one character (the protocol officer) begins reading the Book of Revelation, switching to English when he comes to the word "Armageddon," which is the same in both languages. After this point, the Soviets all speak English, but we are to understand they are still speaking Russian. Furthermore, when the Americans board the Red October, they are greeted by a Soviet sailor who is speaking non-subtitled Russian. Russian-speaking characters remain without subtitles until it is established, minutes later, that Jack Ryan speaks Russian, and that Marko Ramius speaks English. They consistently keep characters using their understood/spoken languages after that point.
- This is averted in the film version of The Sum Of All Fears where all of the non-western characters don't speak English in situations where they wouldn't
- However, the
Soviet National Anthem Hymn to Red October is sung in Russian after the "Armageddon" point.
- In the book version of The Hunt for Red October, Ryan does not speak Russian. Of course, except for certain words and phrases which are explained/translated in the descriptive text when first used, the Soviets use English, in accordance with this trope.
- The 2007 Transformers movie mixes it up heavily. Decepticons speak to each other in Cybertronian, subtitled in Cybertronian glyphs which morph to English. Later, we hear Megatron and Starscream speak to each other in English, but one would assume they're not really holding a conversation in the language of "insects". The Autobots, on the other hand, speak English exclusively, even to each other, as well as in Prime's broadcast to any surviving Autobots at the end, but he's probably not really. Presumably, this was all so the various voice actors would have perhaps three lines instead of Zero.
- The Italian adaptation of Transformers offers a variation of this. Right before Megatron says (the Italian equivalent of) "You failed me yet again, Starscream", he pronounces two unintelligible words, to give the impression that he cussed in Cybertronian and pronounced the rest of the phrase in Italian. However, the two words are merely an insult in Italian ("maledetto bastardo" = "you goddamn bastard") played backwards.
- The James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, despite featuring several Russian characters, has next to no Russian spoken.
- A later Bond film, The World Is Not Enough, subverts this trope. While Bond is undercover as a Russian nuclear physicist, one of the nuclear technicians speaks to Bond for a while (with both of them speaking in perfect English), only to point out near the end of the conversation in Russian "Your English is very good for a Russian". Bond is naturally unfazed and replies (in Russian) that he studied at Oxford.
- The protagonist of I Am David knows several languages, but we only hear him speak English as he travels through Bulgaria, Italy, Switzerland, and finally, to Denmark. At one point, in Italy he meets an American tourist who's trying to tell him his car needs gas. The tourist his heard speaking broken Italian from his own perspective, and saying "My wine cellar needs steak" in English from David's.
- Where Eagles Dare begins with the Allied operatives in a meeting being briefed on their mission to infiltrate a Nazi stronghold. The leader helpfully reminds them that "All of you speak fluent German", which they presumably did not need to be told; it's just a line thrown in only to explain to viewers why all of the dialogue afterwards is in English.
- Judgement at Nuremburg features Maximilian Schell's defense attorney speaking German for the first few sentences of his opening statement, then waiting for his words to be translated before continuing. When he gets to a more dramatic part of his speech, the camera abruptly zooms in on his face and we hear him speaking English, which he and other German characters continue to speak for the rest of the film. There aren't even any more pauses for translation, though we can assume they are happening in the "real" version of events.
- The Longest Day, Battle Of Britain, Tora Tora Tora and other war movies of the period notably avert this with British/American, French, Polish, Japanese and German characters speaking their own languages (with subtitles).
- Lampshaded in the 1983 Mel Brooks version of To Be or Not To Be: "In the interest of clarity and sanity, the rest of this movie will not be in Polish."
- It should be noted that they are not merely speaking in Polish. They're mangling the language heavily, speaking in exaggerated accents that go beyond any non-native Polish this troper has ever heard. It seems that the dialogue is deliberately made to sound as painful as possible.
- Generally played straight in the The Lord of the Rings movies. The movies made a point of having characters speak in Tolkien's invented languages when appropriate, with English subtitles for the 99.9% of viewers who don't speak Elvish. However, when native speakers were talking among themselves, they reverted to English. Thus Galadriel speaks to Elrond in English rather than Sindarin; the Witch-king addresses his orc minions in English rather than Black Speech; et cetera.
- In Moonstruck, many scenes begin with a few sentences in Italian before switching to English. This is presumably intended to indicate when the characters are actually speaking Italian.
- The Scandinavian Arn films uses a variant of this where English represents most languages aside from Swedish (the native language of the central characters) and Norwegian. Throughout the film English represents Arabic, Latin and French, to mention a few. Often an initial line or two is spoken in the intended language, and then they switch to English.
- In The 13th Warrior, Antonio Banderas speaks Arabic, which the movie-goers hear as English. He travels with Norsemen, who speak only Norse. Over a montage, he makes a dedicated effort to learn their language. The dialogue changes slowly but surely from Norse to English, showing that Banderas's character has learned the language. In the book, his character spends most of the story slowly learning the language and having most things translated into Latin by a bilingual Norseman.
- The film Valkyrie opens with Stauffenberg writing a letter and reading it to himself in German, which slowly morphs into English as he continues to speak.
- Avoided in The Red Violin: all of the dialogue is shot in the language appropriate to the place and subtitled as necessary (for example, the scene in Italy is filmed in Italian and subtitled for English audiences but not for Italian ones). Settings include Cremona, Vienna, Oxford, Shanghai, Montreal, and France.
- Avoided too in Moon Child (that movie with Gackt) where every character speaks it origin language be it english, japanese, korean or taiwanese (The movie takes place in some kind of new Honk Kong).
- Ip Man was originally in Cantonese, with the Foshaners speaking Cantonese while Jin's Northerner troupe speaks Mandarin instead of a true northern Chinese dialect. In the Mandarin dub, both the Foshaners and the Northerners speak Mandarin. However, the Japanese characters still speak in Japanese with subtitles.
- Star Trek VI The Undiscovered Country uses a technique similar to Red October in places. In the trial scene, General Chang begins his arguments in Klingon, and then it cuts to Klingon translators rendering it into English, and then cuts back to Chang continuing in English. After one question, he demands that Kirk answer before waiting for the translation. Another scene of the Klingons conferring also has Chang switch to English midway through.
- Sky Blue's original dialogue is all in Korean, but the background text is all in English. Given the ending, it seems that they are in fact speaking English throughout the film.
- In Space Camp, the robot Jinx and the NASA mainframe communicate through voice-synthesized English, even when no humans are around.
- In Outlander, all Norse dialogue is given in English. Interestingly, Kainan speaks with Jim Caveziel's American accent, while the native Norse speakers all have English accents. Kainan's native language is shown as subtitled Icelandic (except in one Flash Back, presumably because Kainan is describing it to his Norse love interest).
- Used in Critters, where the good-guy aliens' speech is presented in English, even before they speed-download a datafile on Earth's native languages and culture. The carnivorous Krites' speech is in growly gibberish with subtitles, and is played for laughs when one Krite's swearing is likewise translated.
- In Madagascar, all of the animals can understand each other and they can understand humanspeak. But humans can't understand them, so when shown from the animals' POV, they're all speaking English as well as the humans for our listening pleasure, and when shown from the humans' POV, they can of course understand each other, but the animals just sound like they're making animal sounds.
- An interesting question: Is this in effect entirely through the flashback narrative of Interview With The Vampire? Obviously, Louis is translating everything for Daniel's benefit, and we can assume naturally that the scenes in colonial Louisiana and Paris are in French, but what about after the Time Shift when New Orleans became American?
- Averted in the movie verson of The Kite Runner. All the scenes where Amir is in Afghanistan are filmed using Afghan actors speaking Persian, with subtitles.
- Done partially in Beowulf, where everybody speaks modern English except for Grendel, who does speaks Old English.
- In The Reader, a film set in Germany, the actors speak German accented English (to the ears of the audience), but the true language they are speaking is German. This includes written text which appears to even look English.
- In the South Korean film Joint Security Area, Swiss and Swedish members of the United Nations stationed in Korea speak English instead of Korean or their native language. A Swiss character of Korean nationality speaks English with a heavy Korean accent rather than a Swiss one.
- Strangely done in Pocahontas - for almost the entire movie, both the Algonquians and the Brits speak English. However, when John meets the title character, she speaks Algonquin - until the magic tree tells her to 'listen with [her] heart', at which point everyone can understand each other no problem.
- In the original French version of Just Visiting - Les Visiteurs - this was played in an unusual way. Jean Reno and Christian Clavier would speak modern French when they were alone, but archaic French when they interacted with modern Frenchmen.
- At first cleverly averted, but then played straight in the Russian sci-fi comedy Kin-Dza-Dza. The Earthling transplantees are initially confounded by the language of the titular system apparently only having one word, coo. As it turns out, the humanoid aliens there have a limited telepathy: with consent, they can read each others' minds, so coo is just a way of getting attention and indicating that you have something to communicate. The two (relatively) helpful aliens who take the Earthlings in use this ability to learn Russian over a handful of scenes to make things easier... but then, even when they're seperated later, every alien speaks Russian instantly with no explanation.
- Oliver Stone intentionally hired Irish and British actors for many of the roles in Alexander, as he wanted them to not only sound natural in their roles, but to represent the many divisions and differences in ancient Greek dialects. For example, Alexander and the Macedonians speak with an Irish accent (which Stone justifies by the historical evidence that Macedon had Celtic influence from the Gauls' passage into modern-day Turkey) while several other of his soldiers sport a variety of British accents, notably Cleitus who speaks with the actor's native Liverpool accent. Oblivious to this, critics gave Stone a lot of flak for this, whereas for some other viewers, their mileage varied.
- In The Dark Crystal everyone speaks English, despite there being no human characters. Originally the Skeksis were going to speak among each other in an invented language (the DVD Extras include work print versions of scenes involving this), with the Gelfling language seeming to be an English analog. This meant a few pretty important scenes had to be conveyed without anyone speaking English for a long time, so the decision was made to just have everyone speak English so the plot would be easier to follow.
- In Time Bandits everyone speaks English, including King Agamemmnon who speaks with a Scottish accent. Of course, he was played by Sean Connery.
Literature
- Most of the time, the characters in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings speak the 'common language' Adûni ("Westron" in English) , which is supposedly translated into English for the readers' benefit. (Tolkien also said that he originally wanted to write the books in one of his fully-developed Elven languages.) In the same vein, the Rohirric language is represented by Anglo-Saxon (=Old English) and the language used by the Dwarves and the Men of Dale by Old Norse, as they were related to Westron in roughly the same way in which the noted languages were to English.
- In James Clavell's Asian Saga novel Shogun, the narrative makes clear that the characters are speaking in various languages — mostly Portuguese, but also Japanese, Spanish, and Latin — but all the dialogue is rendered in English. In the TV miniseries Shogun, all the dialogue which is “really” taking place in Portuguese is rendered in modern English. In moments of intimacy, the two main characters speak in Latin; this is rendered in archaic English, recognisable by the use of singular second-person pronouns (thou) and the "eth" ending.
- Robert Graves' novel I, Claudius, notionally written in first-person by Claudius, is explained in the foreword to be written in Greek. This explains why Claudius explains the meaning and derivation of certain Latin words, and accounts for Claudius' (often evil) relatives being unable to read the memoirs, leading to their accidental preservation.
- The Twelve Kingdoms have a completely different language from Japan, but even though two people who speak different languages can't understand each other, it still sounds like both are speaking Japanese. One character merely tells another that they are speaking another language.
- A similar example occurs in the Discworld book Interesting Times, where the level of understanding between different languages of characters is reflected in how literal the text is, including translating names, leading to such name gems as the characters Pretty Butterfly, Six Beneficial Winds, and One Big River.
- This is, of course, a gag that started with the first Agatean to appear in the books, Twoflower.
- In another Discworld book, Jingo, the dialogue of the Klatchians using their own language in front of Morporkian speakers is simply English in a different font. The words "En al sams la Laisa" are not translated until later, to preserve a joke. (The translation turns out to be "The Place Where The Sun Shineth Not".)
- When Carrot speaks Klatchian his accent isn't perfect, so some letters are still in the usual font.
- Also note that Klatchian is in no way exactly identical to Arabic.
- In Pyramids, there's a footnote to the effect that Ptaclusp's concern that his accidentally two-dimensional son will spend the rest of his life "sleeping cheaply in hotel trouser-presses" is a rather loose translation, as Ptaclusp's language doesn't even have words for "hotel" or "trousers". It does, oddly, have a word for "press for barbarian leg-coverings".
- In the first Harry Potter book/film, when Harry talks to the snake we read/hear them both speaking English (aside from the word "amigo", used by the snake). Even Harry doesn't realise until the following story, where it's a plot point, that he was actually speaking Parseltongue.
- A cynic would claim that this was because Rowling hadn't invented any other details of Parseltongue until she started writing the second book, but there you go.
- Even in the second book Parseltongue is represented as English. It's only in the second MOVIE that it's represented as a different language.
- This is because the books, while in third person, are told from Harry's point of view. Harry couldn't tell the difference between Parseltongue and English, thus neither can we. This can be seen easily in a scene later in the book where Harry is trying to speak Parseltongue to open the Chamber of Secrets, but since he doesn't know when he's speaking Parseltongue, it takes him a few tries. Every try, including the successful one, is written as "open" in English in the book. The movie doesn't have this because the movie is completely third person, and is not connected to Harry.
- In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, while watching a flashback of the Gaunt house, Harry finds it odd that the Ministry of Magic official cannot understand the Gaunts when, to Harry, they're speaking very clearly. It's not until Dumbledore points it out that Harry realizes they're speaking Parseltongue and can begin to separate the hissing from the speaking.
- In L. Ron Hubbard's book Battlefield Earth, the book has a "translator's note" that it is printed in English because of the "unavailability of proper Psychlo fonts".
- The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks has a rather long translation note on the proper rendering of the pronouns for a race that has three genders. Saying that Marain (the language of the protagonist) has one pronoun for males, females, sexless creatures, robots, and anything else, but saying the pronoun for the third gender will be translated as whatever is most appropriate in your primitive language.
- Also, in Banks' novella State Of The Art the story is recounted in a letter to a scholar of Earth culture and translated by a (very advanced AI) drone. The drone complains at the end that the narrator insisted on using untranslatable Marain words, some of which would need three-dimensional diagrams to explain.
- Anathem by Neal Stephenson contains characters who speak several different forms of the same language, due to being in monastic seclusion for varying periods of time. These are all translated as English, but with various nonsense words inserted to simulate the relations between the languages—e.g., "anathem" is used for a word which means something like "anthem" in older languages, and something like "anathema" in newer languages. One major plot point in the novel is foreshadowed by a character whose name is given as a phonetic spelling of "Jules Verne"—it turns out that he's actually from Earth, French, and named after the original Verne.
- Stephenson also employs this in Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle. The latter in particular makes extensive use of it: large parts of the book are set in France with everyone speaking French, and other large parts of the book have several characters speaking a pidgin called Sabir. The characters often reference what language they're speaking, just to make sure the readers get it.
- Harry Turtledove's books render all dialogue in English when everyone present can understand whatever language is being spoken, though he typically makes an effort to replicate the real language's grammar and syntax.
- All the dialogue in Anne McCaffrey's Cattenni series is rendered in English; however, early in the first book, one of the characters is giving out orders, and the narrator specifically notes that one of the words in his speech is in English. It is later stated that everyone actually speaks a creole of four or five different languages.
- The world of Velgarth in the Heralds Of Valdemar series is rather full of different languages, and the language being spoken (in English for the reader) is generally assumed to match the nationality of the speaker unless stated otherwise. It's no wonder telepathy is a common feature of the books.
- Isaac Asimov's Second Foundation lampshades the use of this trope for the Omniscient Council Of Vagueness scenes with the titular Telepathic Spacemen, using standard dialogue to represent meaningful gestures and cryptic sentence fragments.
- Asimov uses the same device to represent the conversations of R. Daneel and R. Giskard in Robots and Empire.
- And of course, there's the entire second section of The Gods Themselves, told about and by Starfish Aliens.
- In some of the Left Behind books, the authors make it clear that the characters are using several different languages dispite the fact that we very rarely read any foriegn words.
- Peter Pan once had a conversation with a Neverbird, who, naturally, spoke 'Neverbird.' The two had quite a screaming match, not being able to understand each other. (The scene really makes no sence in the stage play unless you've read the book first. But it was still pretty funny.)
- Michael Chabon's "The Yiddish Policeman's Union" concerns an Alternate History where Jewish refugees from WWII were allowed to settle in Alaska, and took up Yiddish as a primary language. It's therefore assumed that everyone in the story is speaking Yiddish, except when specifically noted that someone said something "in American."
- About half of all the conversations in Cloud Of Sparrows are in English, and the other half are stated to be in Japanese, though it's all rendered in English. At one point, Genji greets Emily and Stark, and Emily apologises to him for not speaking his language. Genji then turns to Hidé and remarks, in Japanese, on how they think he was speaking Japanese, all of which we read in English. The author gives us a couple of instances in which Genji's heavy accent is explicitly represented, but for the most part leaves it up to the reader to figure out which language they're supposed to be speaking.
- In The Night Watch, Anton read the Treaty to Egor. In the English translation, the Treaty is, naturally enough, written in English, but Anton mentions it's the official Russian translation.
- The Conqueror books represent Mongolian, Chinese, Arabic, Pashto, Russian, and Korean as English. It also occasionally mentions when characters are using Chinese or Arabic as a lingua franca.
- According to the foreword of Nightfall, by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg, the alien protagonists really use their own terms for ground vehicles, distance, time, etc. Asimov and Silverberg, however, choose to use Earthen equivalents for the sake of telling the story more effectively, without Call A Rabbit A Smeerp getting in the way.
- Tim Powers's novel The Drawing of the Dark applies Translation Convention to 16th-century Italian and German dialects (the main language of the story), Old Norse, Welsh, Latin, and several other tongues. An added twist is that the main character himself is subject to this trope; he doesn't actually "know" most of the languages he gets involved with, but he understands them anyway. As you might expect, there is a plot-based reason for this: he's a reincarnation of an ancient hero, who speaks several dead languages but no contemporary ones.
- In the first of her Star Trek books featuring Romulan characters, My Enemy, My Ally, Diane Duane has the main character Ael speaking to her subordinate on her own ship in the Romulan (or Rihannsu) language, but her own thoughts and the exposition are all in English. By the time she leaves the ship and reaches the Enterprise, she's using a subdermal translator, and her speech as translated as English except when a word without an English equivalent (thrai, for instance) is used. The next book in the series of five, The Romulan Way is actually set on Romulus (or, to give it its "proper" name, ch'Rihan), but apart from local expressions and the aforementioned words above, everything is in English until erstaz prisoner of war Mc Coy arrives, leading to lots of Translation Convention fun and frolic. (In fact, it was this series of books that made this Troper regret more than anything else the making of Star Trek: Nemesis, which wiped out everything Duane had established about the Romulans - the cultural history and language explorations in the series were fascinating, far better than those dreadful Remans and their Mini-Picard.)
- The novels of Bernard Cornwell often make use of this trope, particularly those set in a distant historical period. The Saxon Stories uses modern English to represent both Old English and Old Norse, while the Grail Quest series uses it to represent Middle English, Middle French and medieval Occitan.
- Both averted and played straight in the Warlord Chronicles; averted in that the narrator actively asserts the text, effectively an in-universe autobiography, to be a translation, written in Old English rather than the Old Brythonic which supposedly comprises the bulk of the dialogue, while played straight in that both this and the Old English dialogue are rendered in Modern English.
- Colleen Mc Cullough's Masters Of Rome series has the characters all speaking in English, but the language will be referred to as Latin or Greek by in-universe characters.
- Warrior Cats. It goes without saying that cats can't speak human, so all of the dialogue is written in whatever language you happen to be reading the books in.
Live Action TV
- Mac Gyver features many such examples. One episode "For Love and Money" features Czech being used by a number of characters, but nothing said in that language is relevant to the plot. When Anton and his (GRU agent) wife, both Czechslovak, confront each other in an LA zoo, both speak in English.
- The Russian immigrant characters on Irish soap Fair City.
- Also often seen in the Star Trek franchise. In one notable Deep Space Nine episode, Quark, Rom and Nog find themselves in a 20th century American military facility. Whenever a scene is shown from the humans' perspective, the humans speak English and the three Ferengi are incomprehensible. When the scene switches to the Ferengi's perspective, they speak English and the humans are incomprehensible, even though the humans can be assumed to speaking English "in reality".
- It seems fair to assume that the three Ferengi are more-or-less familiar with English as spoken by Humans of 2370 (Quark would certainly make a point of knowing his customers' main languages). The problem is more likely to be that they do not understand the English of Humans four hundred years earlier. The language has almost certainly changed a great deal over time and with exposure to dozens of alien cultures.
- One of the best subversions to this trope yet is the Star Trek The Next Generation episode "Darmok;" the Enterprise crew is unable to understand the new aliens even though the "universal translator" could render their words in English, it's just that their language is so full of proper nouns it's impossible to understand without the prerequisite cultural background.
- We may be able to assume that the crew of the Battlestar Galactica are not really speaking English as well (Galactica 1980 notwithstanding).
- Except for the whole shebang with a cover of Bob Dylan's 'All Along The Watchtower' playing an integral role in the plot. The characters even speak the lines to each other and are understood, implying that they're all speaking English. This could, of course, be an example of a song inexplicably keeping its exact meaning (even if not its melody) through 150,000 years, so... it's best not to think about it.
- Furthermore, all writing is in English, from the GALACTICA on the ship's hull to the instructional pictures of capital and lower-case letters in the daycare center. With the exception of some Chinese writing on boxes in the webisodes and French verbs on the blackboard of Laura Roslin's New Caprica schoolhouse.
- The Tomorrow People: "Achilles Heel": An alien points out a device that he plans to use to speak English, though we never hear him speak anything else. Later, he speaks gibberish for a bit until he adjusts the device. Earlier, in "Into the Unknown", one Tomorrow Person claims that, as he is the only one wearing an artificial environment suit, he will be the only one able to understand an alien, though again, we only ever hear English.
- In the British sitcom Allo, Allo, this was used to great effect; the French characters spoke English with (bad) French accents, the German characters spoke English with (bad) German accents, all the British characters spoke English with exaggerated British accents and word-choices, etc. One character, a British soldier working undercover as a police officer, spoke in a particularly bad French accent and mangled his vowels ("good moaning!"); other characters commented "I don't understand what you're saying, your French is so bad". They were careful to reinforce the idea in the audience's mind when it was going to be a plot point: the "French" characters would complain that they couldn't understand what the "German" speakers were saying to eachother and vice-versa.
- This Troper remembers an episode where the two main French characters were in a car with two English soldiers. The English soldiers spoke English to them, and they stared back blankly. One of the soldiers then starts speaking authentic French, and the French characters responded in English.
- Bizarrely, most of the time no distinction was made between French and German, with French- and German-accented characters conversing together quite happily.
- The three part docudrama Nuremberg: Nazis on Trial features this throughout, with the German characters speaking only in English-accented English. German only appears in archive footage.
- The characters of 24 all seem capable of speaking perfect English, regardless of what country they originally came from...although generally with a thick accent.
- English seems to be the official language of all the vampires and demons in the world of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, regardless of where they originally hail from and what ancient language all those crazy books seem to be written in.
- Unless, of course, it's a plot point that certain characters can't understand them, such as the episode where Giles got turned into a Fyarl demon, and nobody but him and Spike turns out to "speak Fyarl". The trope is still played straight here, though, as in that episode Anthony Head only speaks English when talking to Spike or when we're supposed to be seeing the scene from his perspective instead of the other Scoobies', in which case it switches to growling, grunting gibberish.
- An episode of Coupling revolved around Jeff attempting to flirt with a woman who speaks only Hebrew. After the conversation plays out once, it is repeated from the woman's point of view, during which the woman's Hebrew is replaced with English and the Brits, including Jeff, speak vaguely Italian-sounding gibberish.
- Which the actor made up on the spot. His words of various body parts, in particular, are highly amusing.
- Obviously, in Kung Fu, all the flashback scenes set in the monastery are translated from a Chinese language, probably Putonghua (Mandarin). This leads to an oddity in the episode The Passion of Cheng Yi where Cheng Yi insults Caine by presenting him with a carved ant, pretending to have misremembered Caine's nickname, "Grasshopper" as "Pismire". Since pismire is an old English word for ant, and the Chinese word for ant does not sound like "piss", this makes little sense.
- Doctor Who explains how everyone and everything in the known universe appears to speak perfect English by claiming that it's a side-effect of travelling in the TARDIS, which automatically translates everything into the traveller's native language. This doesn't explain how, in a recent episode, native French speakers had everything they said except terms such as 'Bonjour', 'Mademoiselle' and so forth, but perhaps the TARDIS simply understands that some phrases are easily understood.
- Or it might just assume that they're part of its occupants' native language, if they seem to understand such phrases without aid. The line between foreign language and foreign loan-word is hard to pin down sometimes.
- In a classic episode, an ancient Australian Aboriginal language was not translated, allowing the Australian character Tegan to expand her character by being the only one able to understand and speak it. This is regardless of the fact that there are dozens of loosely related and unrelated Aboriginal languages, and the one they were speaking was unlikely to still exist by the time Tegan was even born.
- In the recent episode, "The Fires of Pompeii", Latin phrases get translated into "Celtic" - that is, early Welsh - prompting the Pompeians to say things like "There's lovely" and "Look you" in response. (It's made by BBC Wales, they're allowed to make jokes like that). This seems to indicate that the TARDIS translates both meaning and context, posh French into posh English, your foreign into their foreign, and possibly even utterly incomprehensible hyper-advanced science for which your language has no words into technobabble. This might even explain how Tegan succeeded.
- This troper agrees with the above, but thought "Celtic" just meant English. What we would know as English, or indeed any recognisable form of it, wouldn't have existed back then, so the nearest thing would be Celtic. So the joke is that Donna's Latin is translated into English, which the tradesman doesn't recognise and presumes to be Celtic, the equivalent in that era.
- The new series seems to have forgotten that TARDIS traveller's aren't supposed to even think about the whole translation thing. In a Fourth Doctor episode, the Doctor realizes that Sarah Jane is under mind control because she wonders why another character isn't speaking Italian. He explains it as a Time Lord gift, not a function of the TARDIS, which makes more sense since there are plenty of times when the TARDIS isn't around to translate.
- Also, the TARDIS apparently doesn't translate particularly rude insults, as seen in the Christmas Invasion.
- In Highlander The Series, virtually all the dialogue in flashbacks takes place in English, even if it makes no sense based on the context. Even in the present-day scenes, although half of the episodes take place in France, almost (though not quite) all the conversation is still heard as English by the audience. In one episode, an entombed Immortal is extracted from a sarcophagus and immediately asks - in English - if "Rome still rules the world."
- There's an interesting use in the British sitcom Private Schulz, where all of the German characters are played by English actors and use those accents, but when Schultz speaks to English speakers in English, his actor adopts a slight German accent.
- Babylon 5 uses it whenever aliens talk to each other with no humans around, though the situation is complicated by one scene where Lennier and Delenn are heard speaking Minbari when they're alone. There is really only one completely explicit use of it, though: in the TV movie In the Beginning, we always hear the Minbari speaking English, but when one of them has a meeting with other races in English, he speaks it hesitantly and leaves some words out.
- Every documentary were historical accounts are recited (think PBS or The History Channel). The recital will always be in English (or the native language of the documentary's target audience), no matter what language the document was originally penned in. Unfortunately (and especially shocking considering the documentary nature of these, well, documentaries) almost all of these recitals tend to be done in very poor taste, with stupid accents so thick they just serve as a cheesy distraction from the document's actual message and meaning, if not being outright as incomprehensible as the original language..
- The 2005 UK miniseries Casanova drew attention to this trope by having Casanova (a native Italian speaker) repeatedly travelling to other countries and being praised on his mastery of the local language at each destination. Of course, all the viewer heard was English.
- His mastery is excellent in every language, bar English. His accent is supposedly 'hilarious'.
- The British adaptations of the Kurt Wallander novels are filmed in Sweden, but uses this in nearly its purest form. The actors are all British and speak English with British accents. Apparently, they decided that attempting Swedish accents would sound silly. Emphasis on nearly- virtually all the written text on-screen is in Swedish, which leads to Talking To Themselves moments.
- Averted in the Pushing Daisies episode "Din Sum, Lose Some", where the narrator states that "Bao chose to reply in English".
- Parodied in the Cross Over episode of Boy Meets World. After an ambush in World War II Cory wakes up with no memory of who he is, and "speaking perfect french." Later the girl who found him speaks actual french, leading to the line "Excuse me, I only speak french."
- On a related note, the title character in John Doe was fished out of Puget Sound by some Hmong fishermen. The first clue that he somehow knew everything, except who he was and how he'd gotten there, was that he replied to their questions in their own language (with subtitles), without even realizing he was doing so. His encyclopedia-brain had, in effect, pulled this trope on him from within.
Tabletop Games
- The background information for Warhammer 40000 indicates that humanity has moved on to speak "Gothic", but all records and dialogues are rendered in English. While the alien races also have their own languages, the Translation usually does not kick in and second-hand interpretation needs to come in. In some of the spinoff media though, like the Dawn Of War series, the Convention is in full force regardless of what race the player uses. Then there's "High Gothic", which is rendered as Latin with occasional bits of other languages, usually German, thrown in.
Theater
- Gilbert and Sullivan's final collaboration together, The Grand Duke, features this. The story is set in the German state of Pfennig-Halbpfennig, and the characters all speak perfect English. Gilbert then rather neatly lampshaded this state of affairs by having the only English character, Julia Jellicoe, speak in a comically bad German accent, at one point even complaining that German is a difficult language to master. In fact, the part was written for a Hungarian actress.
- And not to be forgotten is the moment in The Mikado where the chorus sings, "The Japanese equivalent for Hear! Hear! Hear!"
- Common in opera. As an example of the peculiarities this can lead to: Lucia di Lammermoor's libretto was originally in Italian; a version in French also exists. The story takes place in Scotland, so presumably the characters are "really" speaking English. But before English-speaking audiences it is always sung in French or Italian with English captions.
Video Games
- The trope makes a little more sense in videogames if the player character is supposed to know the language in question, since this trope then equates to not requiring the player to learn something their character knows already.
- Almost completely averted in Star Wars Knights Of The Old Republic both games, as characters speaking other languages actually speak those languages. If your character understands them, you'll see the subtitles in English. Somewhat disappointing in that the non-English languages appear to just be a mish of various foreign-sounding jibbering, repeated over and over despite the context of their speech.
- Tomb Raider 2 - Bartoli and his various henchmen, with ridiculous, exaggerated and almost untelligable Italian accents.
- All characters in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater speak American (or British where appropriate) English, but are assumed to be speaking Russian or the listener's native language. The Russian scientist Sokolov remarks (in English) that the American agent Snake's Russian is excellent, despite all lines having been spoken in English. Interestingly, there is one character with an actual Russian accent, who is always seen drunk- the implication is that the 'left over' accent is a result of his slurred speech being harder to understand, and thus not translated as well as the others.
- Amusingly enough, Naked Snake's Japanese voice actor, Akio Ohtsuka, was more than prepared to do all the dialogue in Russian, and had been taking lessons. The director, Hideo Kojima, was also enthusiastic about the idea, but the rest of the voice cast, who did not want to learn an entirely different language for very little purpose (and after all the American characters weren't speaking in English, were they?), threw various tantrums until the idea was finally overrun and dropped. Ohtsuka, disappointed, reportedly dropped random ad-libbed Russian into his lines until the rest of the cast was thoroughly sick of him constantly necessitating re-takes.
- This troper simply assumed that Granin had a Russian accent because he does speak in English with Snake. Also, this trope applies to the second and fourth game of the series as well: MGS2 features Russian private army members, while MGS 4 includes many nameless NP Cs from the Middle East, South America, and Eastern Europe. In all cases, the characters speak in perfect English.
- [1] says that Granin and Snake were speaking English.
- In some ways this occurs in the Wing Commander games mainly 2 and 3. All of the humans speak English with some saying stuff in other languages. The Kilrathi the alien race all speak English to them selves and to humans even though they do not speak in their native language. The novels change this up a bit since in the novels the Kilrathi speak in their native tongue which shows up as English in the text, but when Kilrathi pilots taunt Terran pilots their taunts get translated into English with translation devices in the pilots fighters.
- In Wolfenstein 3 D, the Nazi soldiers spoke only in German.
- In Return to Castle Wolfenstein, this was replaced with accented English—but Germans also peppered their speech with untranslated German words and phrases—usually ones that would be recognizable to English-speaking ears. In combat, however, they speak purely German (no matter what they're fighting).
- Similar to Metal Gear Solid in that B.J. Blazkowicz is implied to be fluent in German, a necessity for his missions as an OSA agent.
- Used in Eternal Darkness whenever Alex reads from the book of the same name. To indicate the presence of translation, several chapters (Such as Augustus Pious's) begin in Latin, which shifts into English after a few lines of dialogue. Interestingly, the mouth flaps often don't match the dialogue, giving the impression that it has been overdubbed.
- In Crysis, the Korean soldiers yell out orders and battle tactics to each other in accented English — except when playing at the highest difficulty setting, in which they all speak un-subtitled Korean.
- In the first Kingdom Hearts, you visit the Tarzan world, and Tarzan himself is about as articulate as he usually is. Except for one scene, where Tarzan, speaking to the apes, is uncharacteristically articulate, making an impassioned plea to them. Then, they cut to the perspective of Sora and company, and all of Tarzan's dialog becomes grunts.
- This is because film the world is based on uses this convention as well. However, because the film is from Tarzan's point of view, he only starts doing the Hulk Speak thing halfway throught the film, when Jane shows up.
- In Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, the player has the option to have all the unimportant NP Cs talk either in english or their native tongues. With the former, they can understand all the random conversations the NP Cs have with eachother, while the latter is more realistic. However when interrogating a foe, they will always talk in english.
- In the Russian campaigns of the first two Callof Duty games, most characters speak in Russian-accented English. Some unimportant lines(such as battle cries) are rendered in full Russian. Also, at one point in the first game, the main character hears a German propaganda broadcast aiming to demoralize Russian soldiers, presumably in German-accented Russian. The player hears it as German-accented English.
- The same is true of the third game in the series. During the Polish campaign, for example, the Polish NP Cs speak in accented English whenever the player needs to understand them, but also occasionally break out into untranslated Polish.
- In the Battlefield series of multiplayer shooters, the player has the option to have non-English-speaking armies speak in their native language or have their speech "translated" into perfect English. The first choice grants the game a sense of authenticity, but might disadvantage a player(unless the player can understand an army's native language) as they have to look at the edge of the screen when a verbal command is given, where the command is written in English no matter what.
- ... or indeed, whatever language the game is set up for. This means players from all over the world can interact pretty effectively even with no mutual language. For this reason, an English player can wander on to a German server, and due to the Translation Convention, be perfectly understood (or vice versa) if they're giving commands via the in-game communication menu (which covers most of the basic commands needed). Obviously though, it doesn't work for typed chat text.
- Played straight in Syberia: as the heroine travels from a village in the French Alps east into Germany, across Europe and into Russia, almost all the characters speak (and write) English — not just English, not just American-accented English, but modern American idiom, even to the use of "retard" as a noun (in a journal written in the 1930s).
- Given the setting and the amount of Gratuitous German throughout, the player is meant to understand that the first Atelier games use German (or something like it) as the spoken language, even though all important readable text and all dialog is in Japanese (or English, should the games ever be brought over). This is, however, abandoned from Atelier Iris onward - the characters may or may not be speaking "our" language but there are basically no hints as to what else they'd be saying.
- In the Halo series, the Covenant are Handwaved to be heard in English via Translator Microbes, but they also are heard speaking English to each other in the absence of humans.
- Averted in the case of the Grunts. The free background book that came with the Special Edition version of Halo 3 states that the Grunt's have an almost constant ability to learn very quickly. This, combined with the common position as communications workers, has enabled them to gain a partly complete understanding of English (something they take considerable pride in).
- Justified in the unlockable Time Line in Halo Wars, where one of the unlockable Covenant communiques calls for the formation of a task force to learn the language of the "Unclean" pretty early in the war, and that this task force was only to speak [English] to each-other. (Guess it caught on pretty fast.)
- Note that in Halo 1 the Elites speak an incomprehensible gibberish in contrast to the Grunts (who seem less imposing and more pathetic due to their habit of speaking in broken English), but in Halo 2, when the Elites become humanized and the Arbiter becomes a protagonist, the Elites not only speak in "English" to each other in the Covenant-POV scenes but can be heard speaking perfect English by Master Chief (and Master Chief and the Arbiter eventually meet up and have a conversation). Which means that either the Elites all got English lessons or the Humans' Translator Microbes got an upgrade. Either way, the Elites are now ironically more imposing because their English is *better* than the pidgin the Grunts speak. (And yes, the Grunts speak an awkward pidgin no matter what POV you view them from; apparently they don't speak the Elites' language any better than they speak English.)
- Explicitely stated in the novels. Sometime between Halo 1 and 2 the humans finished translating the Elites' language. Note that they never do fully get a hang of the Jackal, Brute or Prophet languages, which remain foreign-sounding jibberish throughout the games.
- In Quake 4, signs in the alien language are incomprehensible until an alien communications node is jammed into the player character's brain; immediately thereafter (and with a rather cool transformation effect) the alien signs are in English, with a stylized alien font.
- The written alien language is simply English in a wingdings-esque font anyway, so if you had a character chart and too much free time you could translate all the signs from the beginning of the game.
- Nobody knows if this applies to Half Life 2. While it seems to take place in a post-apocalyptic Bulgaria, everyone has Anglo-Saxon names and speaks with American Accents.
- Given the Combine's administrative policies and the fact that most of the main characters are explicitly American, they're probably speaking English.
- Justified in Assassins Creed, as the Animus renders everything understandable to Desmond, due to the fact that they're his genetic memories.
- Ratchet And Clank, maybe? Because, you know, it unfolds in galaxies far far away, and everything is much MUCH farther from England than my arse is from the dark side of Europa.
- Rival Schools has three American characters: Roy, Tiffany and Boman. Despite their nationalities, Roy and Boman speak Japanese in all of their in-game voice overs, while Tiffany speaks mostly Japanese with occasional slips of English (lampshaded by the explanation that Tiffany's a horrifically bad Japanese speaker).
- Street Fighter on the other hand (due to the nationality) has stated that characters speak in either English or Japanese with the translation convention going both ways. For example Ryu and Sakura are speaking Japanese, while Guile and Cammy are speaking english, with Chun Li pretty much speaking English, or Japanese depending on the situation. This is why Ryu has no accent (since Translation Convention is going on) but Cammy sports an English accent.
- In Star Control II, your ship has a translation computer which understands almost all alien languages. "Almost", because the Orz language is apparently too strange or complicated to be translated completely, resulting in exchanges such as "Who are you? Are you *silly cows*? No, you are not *silly cows*, you are *happy campers*."
- Used in Rockman.EXE / Mega Man Battle Network, although justified in the second game which explained that the dialogue was being translated by Netto's PET. In fact, until Rockman / Mega Man turns on the translator function, foreign characters' dialogue appear as a bunch of unpronounceable symbols.
- In most of the games in the Castlevania series, the characters are most likely supposed to be speaking European languages. In Aria of Sorrow the Japanese characters, like Soma Cruz and Graham Jones, are shown to be speaking Japanese in their voice clips, even in the English release.
- The first Bushido Blade game had a Caucasian foreigner (probably American, but this troper doesn't remember for certain) who spoke in halting, uncertain English, presumably to mirror his halting, uncertain Japanese in the original release. At one point near the end of his storyline, he even gets confused on a verb tense and curses Japanese for being such a complicated language.
- Particularly egregrious example from the opening scene of Shenmue II: Japanese protagonist Ryo gets off the boat in Hong Kong and asks a street urchin for directions, only for the boy to exclaim in Japanese that this is the first time he's ever heard the language being spoken. The rest of the game doesn't do any better in this regard.
- Applies straight in most Shin Megami Tensei games released since Nocturne: despite being translated into English, the player is meant to understand that everyone is speaking Japanese, except for a few cases. The Persona games even use gratuitous honorifics to hammer home the point.
Web Comics
- Linburger. Whenever a language is spoken that some characters in the scene understand, but other may not understand, the text appears as regular English, with little symbols at the beginning and end of the sentence.
- Used slyly here, in the webcomic Cat's Grace. "What the — that's a different font! That means we're not speaking the same language!"
- Though it's never made explicit in the narrative, Word Of God has it that Tales Of MU is "translated" from Pax, the fictional language the narrator speaks.
- More Tales Of MU also translates elvish into English, since that narrator is bilingual. The rotating viewpoint side stories tend to translate all dialogue into English, regardless of what language is actually being spoken.
- Untranslated background text, names, and setting all suggest that the characters in Girl Genius are actually speaking German and some Romanian, which has been confirmed by Word Of God.
- Megatokyo uses English and angle brackets, as mentioned above. There are also occasional scenes in Japanese, when the actual meaning is not as important as the fact that the viewpoint character does not understand the language.
- Get Medieval uses the translation convention heavily, originally justified because it was first written as being about time travelers in medieval France, but now required since the creator changed them to aliens before the start of the comic. So references to Morse code, which would be wholly explicable for time travelers to make, become a shorthand for "a signal code similar to Morse code, but invented by someone else" when in the mouths of aliens. Apparently, not many readers know of the Translation Convention, as the creator has had to field complaints and comments on it frequently in her commentary and on the comment pages.
- Elven Lacryment has various characters of different races speaking to each other, though different races are represented with different fonts.
- Errant Story uses .
Western Animation
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