| abstract
| - A character thinks he can speak some language, but fails comedically and says something entirely different than what was intended -- often complete nonsense or something rude. For example, maybe he tries to say "Can I please buy some matches?", but actually says "My Hovercraft Is Full Of Eels". Hilarity Ensues. This typically has nothing to do with bad translations; the original speech was incorrect. For bad translations, see Either World Domination or Something About Bananas, Blind Idiot Translation, or Translation Train Wreck. 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 example, Bob thinks he speaks French well. 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." This is only rarely Truth in Television, mostly in relation to tonal languages such as Mandarin Chinese and specific "false friends" (such as the Spanish word "embarazada", meaning "pregnant"). Most of the time, someone who speaks a language poorly just speaks it slowly, with a poor accent, and stumbling over vocabulary and grammar. Also 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. The trope namer is Monty Python's Flying Circus, which is actually a relatively justified example: the speaker is a victim of an intentionally inaccurate (and often dirty) Hungarian-English phrasebook. For the bored and/or curious, the actual Hungarian for the title is A légpárnás járművem tele van angolnával. It's pronounced vaguely like "Ah laygpaarnaash yaahrmewvem telleh von ungohlnaaval", with the first syllable of every word receiving stress; the v is always like an English v, never like a German one (which is either F or V). A 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. A subtrope of Fun with Foreign Languages. Often used in conjunction with Eloquent in My Native Tongue. 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. Not to be confused with I Need to Go Iron My Dog. 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 Examples of My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels include:
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