Either World Domination or Something About Bananas: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

A comedy trope. An incidental character says something in a foreign language. A character who either speaks a little of the language or has a translation method attempts to explain it to the others. For some reason, he/she narrows it down to a few possibilities, and they have absolutely nothing in common in terms of meaning, often with one being rather reasonable in the context while the other is absurdly different. Sometimes they pin it down to the one translation but then it's just so ill fitting, they can spot it's wrong. There's a tendency to have the two resultant statements sound similar even after translation. One begins to wonder what kind of language could possibly have that property, but real languages ''are'' that weird.

== Western Animation ==

* In ''[[Jimmy Neutron]]'' Sheen did this once, when he believed he could read hieroglyphics simply because they looked similar to writing from his favorite TV show. They clearly were not the same.

* The ''[[Aqua Teen Hunger Force]]'' episode "Travis of the Cosmos" had an alien taking over Shake's brain to communicate. Unfortunately, the alien only spoke broken Japanese. Frylock tried translating, but could only come up with a marriage proposal.

{{quote|'''Frylock:''' He agrees! ''Or he DISAGREES!!''}}

[[Category:Language Tropes]]

[[Category:Stupidity Tropes]]