Foreign Looking Font: Difference between revisions

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* The kanji in ''[[Black Butler]]'s'' title are written in the style of Old English blackletter calligraphy, reflecting the show's Victorian English setting. (No, really; see its page illustration!)
* Sometime around the Hoenn Saga in the ''[[Pokémon (anime)|Pokémon]]'' anime, the producers used a faux-Japanese text on signs, letters, etc., to make it more "acceptable" for a global audience.
** It appeared earlier in the series too. It doesn't even try to look Japanese a lot of the time, it looks like mixed up symbols.
* One scene in ''[[One Piece]]'' had a close up of Luffy's first bounty poster. Oddly, in a world that [[Word of God|speaks English,]] has English signs, and English words ''right on the bounty poster,'' the [[Fine Print]] is nothing but a random assortment of letters and characters.
* Typesetting, one of the major tasks in creating anime [[Fan Sub|fansubs]], involves finding or in some cases creating fonts to match onscreen Japanese text, which are then placed over or near the original text.
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*** Also occurs (obviously) in ''Asterix and Cleopatra'', but mainly with secondary characters.
** ''Asterix'' is absolutely in love with this trope, Egyptians speak in hieroglyphics, Normans in the suitably Scandanavian-styled alphabet (with å and ø for a and o), Greeks uses the proto-Greek angular font, the Goths in blackletter, the Amerindians in pictographs, and Romans tend to get into Trajan-esque capitals when getting eloquent (with V replacing U).
** Similarly, [[Symbol Swearing|symbols denoting curse words]] also change appearance based on the language the character speaks.
* Various letterers use [http://www.blambot.com/fonts_dialogue.shtml interesting fonts] to represent people who have an accent or are speaking an alien language.
* In ''[[Blue Beetle]]'', the Scarab-speak letters correspond to English, but they're almost entirely illegible. However, when the Scarab gets [[Character Development]], the letters change into more readable English while still invoking the previous version.
* The French cover (but not the English cover) of ''[[Tintin/Recap/Land of Black Gold|Land of Black Gold]]'' has the words "L'or Noir" written in pseudo-Arabic calligraphy. The Arabic writing underneath is a correct translation of the title (though it wasn't in the first edition; this particular book was revised many, many times).
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* ''[[2000 AD|Two Thousand AD]]'' commonly uses vaguely Cyrillic-looking letters when ''[[Nikolai Dante]]'' is on the cover.
* ''[[Thor]]'' writers like to give his dialogue a calligraphic font.
* Inverted in "Superdupont vs. Bruce Lee" cartoon by Gotlib. Superdupont uses the usual comic [[Symbol Swearing]], peppered with some Chinese-looking symbols. Bruce Lee retorts with the same swearing symbols-only the Chinese add-ons are replaced with ABCDEF.
** Same author, "No Japonaise". The gag is played straight (to hell and back, that is) ending with [http://kimonovintage.blogspot.com/2007/05/gotlib-n-japonais-6.html stepdancing little green men].
* The title of [[Animesque]] comic ''Deity'' is rendered on the cover in a font based on Japanese katakana - to the point that it takes a moment to realize you're actually looking at English.
* Used to a great extent in ''[[Fables]]''. The occasional [[Backwards R]] makes something instantly Russian.
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== Films -- Live-Action ==
* [[Peter Jackson]]'s ''[[The Lord of the Rings (film)|The Lord of the Rings]]'' has both: Although lots of texts appear 'properly' written in [[J. R. R. Tolkien|JRR Tolkien]]'s constructed scripts for Middle-earth, various instances of text are rendered as English in Latin letters for the convenience of the viewer, but made to look vaguely like the scripts they are supposed to be. Most notable is probably the Tengwar-imitating font (an originally Elven script, but universally used), even down to the ''tehtar'' diacritics, which in proper Tengwar are vowel signs and here are added to the corresponding vowel letters.
* ''[[Quantum of Solace]]'' used exotic fonts to label each country the story takes place in. [[Maddox]] criticized this use of the trope in his review of it, saying that its use crossed the line into pretentious and implies that [[Viewers are Morons]].
* ''[[Around the World In 80 Days]]'' (2004) has this with all the map fonts throughout (eg, Hindi-style script for the Chyrons in India, etc.).
 
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*** When someone is speaking Klatchian, they have the whole sentence in the pseudo-Arabic font. When they're speaking Morporkian with a Klatchian accent, the letter that changes font is usually an H. If you actually know anything about Arabic, this is a bit of a [[Bilingual Bonus]], because there are three Arabic letters that can be transliterated as H, and they all sound different.
**** lampshaded in ''Jingo'' by 71-Hour Achmed, who is posing as a sort of 'joke' Klatchian for reasons of his own. His "H'I go, h'I come back' phrase is based on a character in the once-popular radio series ''ITMA''
***** lampshaded, averted and subverted by Fred Colon, Nobby Nobbs and Vetinari. Colon makes a complete fool of himself (more than usual, at any rate) by attempting to pose as a Klatchian IN KLATCH, using ''[[Just a Stupid Accent]]'' which gets him precisely nowhere and leads to his being persuaded to repeat a local joke under the impression that it is the information he is seeking. Nobby, however, takes refuge in ''[[Rule of Funny]]'' and appears to be able to communicate with the local women (while disguised as a woman) to the extent of telling what appears to be a version of the "12-inch pianist" joke, without any use of the ''local'' font, but without spotting Colon's mistake. Vetinari, in turn, denies speaking the language at all but again appears to be quite capable of understanding and being understood, again all in standard font - probably ''[[Rule of Cool]]'', in his case. Colon then rounds off the whole routone by what amounts to a bilingual pun, by which he is thought to come from the city of Ur, apparently a byword for bucolic stupidity in Klatch.
* The ''[[Thursday Next]]'' series features an ancient prophet who speaks "Old English"... that is, his dialogue is written in Old English font. One character can understand him (as well as the reader, of course), but the rest really do behave as though he were speaking an ancient dialect.
** And then there's the native language of the Book World, which is Courier Bold
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* ''[[Sinfest]]'' renders The Buddha's (very few) spoken lines in a font that mimics Sanskrit.
* The title of Brain Clevinger's ''[[How I Killed Your Master]]'' is written in English, but is easily mistaken for Kanji at first glance.
* In ''[[8-Bit Theater (Webcomic)|Eight Bit Theater]]'', Black Mage pretends to be Blackbelt to talk to White Mage by speaking [[Japanese Ranguage]], [[Self-Demonstrating Article|lendeled in the Chinese lestaulant font]].
 
 
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* Look hard enough and you'll find fonts in fake Hebrew, fake Arabic, fake Japanese, fake Greek...
** The free font site Dafont.com is full of them, as are myriad other free font sites.
** A fake Korean font exists.
** A fake Hindi font exists in which the letters are just written curvier and have a line on top.
* The absolute king of this trope is Papyrus. It's generically foreign looking enough that it can stand in for nearly anything, from Greek, to Middle Eastern to Chinese. Papyrus is overused to the point where there's a [http://www.papyruswatch.com/ blog] dedicated to looking for it.