Either World Domination or Something About Bananas: Difference between revisions
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** In the same book, Rincewind is often shown cycling through different meanings of what is presumably the same phrase. It's all [[Translation Convention|represented as English]], but it's an accurate, and hilarious, reflection of problems non-native speakers of Chinese can have pronouncing the words/phrases they really want.
** In ''[[Discworld/The Fifth Elephant|The Fifth Elephant]]'', Vimes makes the mistake of trying out his extremely limited Dwarfish. Apparently, he never had reason to discover that the word he's been told means "you" actually means something closer to "you troublemaking lawbreaker". It doesn't help that the version of Dwarfish he's most familiar with is the slang-laden "Street Dwarfish."
* ''[[Sewer Gas and Electric]]'' by Matt Ruff: The sentient AI that lives in Disneyland overhears a conversation behind the doors of Walt Disney's secret
** Unlike most examples, it wasn't really mistaken or confused: it ''deliberately'' chose the option that would let it {{spoiler|kill people, because it hated humans and was bored}}.
* In [[Lawrence A Perkins]]' story "Delivered With Feeling", the alien race which calls in an Earth fixer to help them deal with other, invading aliens has a VERY difficult language, fragmented into numerous dialects. The fixer's solution involves a "patriot dialect" keyed to the slogan "The manly honor of our forefathers is unblemished"; but the invaders manage to render it as "There are no body lice on my grandfather's mustache". This actually makes sense in context, as the fixer tells his computer to make it as difficult as possible for foreigners to understand.
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*** Another example from Canadian French is the first time someone learning French, and thus learning about the nasal-''n'' at the end of words orders a "poutine", and forgets the ''e'' in "-ine" means the ''n'' is not nasal, so they'll use a nasal-n...which inevitably comes out sounding like they ordered a ''putain'', a prostitute.
**** UNLESS you're in Quebec, where the alternate meanings to "poutine" are either the local french fries in gravy and cheese dish OR roughly hewn pieces of lumber that lumberjacks used to float down the river towards the lumber mill. The prostitute meaning wouldn't even be considered because to a french canadian "poutine" and "putain" are two separate pronunciations.
*** The various meanings of these words aside, this has led to some hilarity in the translation of the name of Russian leader [[Vladimir Putin]]. You see, pronouncing the word spelled "P-u-t-i-n" according to French rules produces a word pronounced ''exactly'' like ''putain'' (again, "prostitute"). As a result, the French Academy decided to spell his name "Poutine", which produces a similar ''pronunciation'' to the Russian "Путин"...only to realize, too late, that this official transcription now made French-Canadians think of delicious fries with curds and gravy every time they saw or heard the name of the leader of a major world power. To rub salt on the wound, word got out to English Canada and to the border regions with the United States (which are familiar with the dish), which all had a good laugh at the ''Academie's'' expense; word got out even farther when William Safire dedicated a disapproving "On Language" column in ''The New York Times'' to the subject in 2005. Even
* Japanese is about as bad - in fact, the sheer number of homophones are one of the reasons why kanji are used in addition to kana. One particularly famous sentence demonstrating this is pronounced "Niwa no niwa de wa, niwa no niwatori ga niwaka ni wani wo tabeta," meaning "In Mr. Niwa's garden, two chickens suddenly ate an alligator."
** Ginatayomi is a kind of humorous Japanese wordplay based on ambiguity in where one word starts and another begins (as written Japanese uses no spaces between characters). Basically, a sentence with two interpretations, one perfectly normal, the other similar, but very strange.
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*** Worse than that. The accent marks the stressed syllable. Without an accent? If the word ends in a vowel, the stress false on the penultimate syllable. Cómo and como are pronounced identically.
* There was a highly mediatized and parodied incident where [[Bill Clinton]] came to [[Romania]] with the occasion of its integration into NATO (or something like that). At one point, Bill Clinton states as best as I recall "We shall march forward, shoulder to shoulder". The woman translator, which incidentally until then did a good job (considering it was a live broadcast), translated it into "șold la șold” (which sounds almost identical, "ș is read as ”sh” in English). Which means ”hip next to hip”. [[Hilarity Ensues]] when you imagine two presidents jointed at the hip, not being able to go anywhere without the other being forced to move to the same place. If this hadn't been accidental, it would have earned a [[Crowning Moment of Awesome]] to anyone who made such a joke, but it would have probably not have been so well known.
* In recent news, a Turkish man messaged his wife a sentence that reads "You change the topic every time you run out of arguments". The cellphone doesn't have the letter "ı", however, and used the standard letter "i" instead, so the word "sıkısınca" looked far too much like the word "sikişince"
* American Sign Language has a few of these as well. The signs for 'hungry' and 'horny' are basically the same sign with one moving up and one moving down. 'Recently' and 'sex' are the same, with one moving backwards and one moving forwards. 'Shy' and 'hooker' can be mistaken for each other.
** In fact, almost every sign in ASL is similar to another, and a lot of them only differ by a few centimetres (moving a finger down five or ten centimetres can completely change a meaning, for example). For this reason, in deaf culture, it's extremely impolite to interrupt a conversation - it takes a lot of concentration even for fluent signers to see the difference between some signs.
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** Finnish also has this gem. Taken from [[The Other Wiki]]:
{{quote|''Olin seitsemän vuotta sedälläni kodossa renkinä'' (Finnish for "I spent seven years at my uncle's home as a servant"). This is to tease Eastern Tavastians, who pronounce 'd' as 'l'. It becomes ''Olin seitsemän vuotta selälläni kolossa renkinä'', which means "I spent seven years a servant in a hole, lying on my back" – certain connotations of being a sex slave.}}
* Then there is "crack" (Anglicization of Irish language "craic", or is it the other way around?), slangy word for good-time-and-good-company. There is a tale of a Bronx bar which advertised "free crack", and found it had
* An example from English: removing the apostrophe from {{smallcaps|Joe Blow's Seafood}} changes the meaning from "Seafood belonging to Joe Blow" to "Joe performs lewd acts on seafood." [http://www.flickr.com/photos/vertigogo/1563924386/ Oh no, they left it out!]
* In Dutch, there's the question: "Wat was was eer was was was?" and the answer: "Eer was was was was was is." Right up to the last word, they could be talking about laundry, or wax - but the last word says that it's actually about the past tense of to be. It works in English too: "What was was before was was was?" "Before was was was, was was is" (would you believe me if I said the English sentence actually has a different word order from the Dutch one?)
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