Note: If you are interested in learning how to say that your hovercraft is full of eels in many languages, Omniglot has a useful compilation Not to be confused with I Need to Go Iron My Dog (which, though, is a totally legit result of My Hovercraft Is Full Of Eels if your first language is Russian: "to pet a dog" and "to iron a dog" sound identical in that language).
Dinner Order Flub is this applied to restaurant settings. Also compare Either "World Domination", or Something About Bananas, which is about inept translations, Separated by a Common Language, in which similar problems happen because of differences in dialect, and Malaproper, a character who does this in their native language. Often used in conjunction with Eloquent in My Native Tongue.
He speaks in French to a waiter, who looks at him oddly and says "Monsieur, I do not think that you really meant to say that there is a blue banana in your navel."Īlso happens sometimes with written language: some languages (such as Hungarian and Arabic) rely on diacritics to distinguish similar-looking words, and ideographic languages (such as Chinese and Japanese) have complicated characters whose meaning (and pronunciation) can completely change with the difference of a few strokes.Ī common explanation for the trope is that the character making the mistake has been taught something rude by a mischievous native speaker, playing on their ignorance to purposefully give an obscene translation for something reasonable.Ī subtrope of Fun with Foreign Languages.
For example, Bob thinks he speaks French well. However, if the language being spoken isn't the language of the work as a whole, there's usually a translation back so that the audience can see just how wrong the character's speech actually was. For bad translations, see Either "World Domination", or Something About Bananas, "Blind Idiot" Translation, or Translation Train Wreck. This typically has nothing to do with bad translations the original speech was incorrect. Consulting a (dirty) Hungarian-to-English phrasebook, he then proceeds to walk into a tobacco shop and ask the guy at the counter, "Can I please buy some matches?" but he ends up actually saying "My hovercraft is full of eels." Hilarity Ensues. In the sketch that is the Trope Namer, a character thinks he can speak Hungarian (or whatever), but fails comedically and says something entirely different than what was intended - often complete nonsense or something rude. I will not buy this trope description, it is scratched.
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