Carrot and Angua's discussion of affirmative action hiring practices in Men At Arms. Carrot admits Angua was probably accepted to the Watch, and Vimes probably isn't happy about this, because she's a w... and Angua interupts in outrage. Carrot (and, at this point, the reader) thinks Angua was hired because she's a woman; Angua, thinking (correctly) that it's more likely she was hired because she's a werewolf, assumes Carrot knows this. The resulting conversation makes sense both ways.
It's not a Translation Convention, Morporkian is English. The Science of Discworldalone shows that, and the series is filled with Morporkian/English puns. Even with an almost unreasonable degree of pedantry, it's perfectly reasonable to think that two words start with the same phoneme as each other in two unrelated languages, and the odds of the two languages being the reader's and the characters' just in time forthe mistake to happen would only get low enough to make it silly if the Literary Agent Hypothesis were in effect.
JET73L:
Removed the second line of this:
It's not a Translation Convention, Morporkian is English. The Science of Discworld alone shows that, and the series is filled with Morporkian/English puns. Even with an almost unreasonable degree of pedantry, it's perfectly reasonable to think that two words start with the same phoneme as each other in two unrelated languages, and the odds of the two languages being the reader's and the characters' just in time for the mistake to happen would only get low enough to make it silly if the Literary Agent Hypothesis were in effect.