Who said my hovercraft is full of eels

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. 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.

You should be happy to let the mountain goats breed in peace You and your men should not upset the natural balance of the soil If you are irresponsible now, your children will inherit a twisted and barren environment. You enjoy mating with goats You and your men perform unnatural acts in the dirt Because of your evil wickedness , may your children be born deformed and barren.

I know you're feeling pretty hey sailor up here about now. But if you would just let me order a bowl of fried clams, we can all have smallpox tomorrow. I mean Oh, yes You'd be very welcome to join us. You could perhaps be a barbarian Lori : So if I wanted to say "I live near the river," I'd do it like this? Stephen : "Let's see if you can guess this one: 'Mia kusenventurilo estas plena de angiloj.

Stephen : Yes, 'my hovercraft is full of eels. Stephen : Yes. Rob : laughing I thought you were being cross with me there, you were saying that just to move on!

Many, many oxen! Show me your mucus! Hawkeye : Oo-san! Radar : Sir, you're calling him an umbrella! Parker : Don't be afraid. I will make your tomato shiny. Please come with. Men will sadden you. Niles : En garde! Frasier : Oh great, that's just what we need! A fourth language!

Waseem: reading the message "I will be wearing a white shirt and--" See this word here? It's a kind of spicy goat cheese. Michael: My Urdu's a little rusty. I was trying to say "black pants". Waseem: Well, at least you got the name of the restaurant right. Bloodnok : Interrogating German spy Achtung!

Omniglot has a webpage [4] of the phrase in various languages. Monty Python Wiki Explore. Recent blog posts. Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account? Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook. Edit source History Talk 0. A joke about the census; the census worker asked how many people are there.

American clothing and tattoos with Chinese and Japanese characters that are utter nonsense. There's a blog dedicated to pointing those out. Careless use of any Pinyin based input programs for Chinese can cause this problem as well, since tone marks are often omitted during input.

Unlike most examples above, even native speakers are not immune to this phenomenon, leading to mockery by Grammar Nazis. Cantonese has quite a few examples as well.

It's not helped by the fact that some people pronounce "o1" as "ngo h 1". It is entirely possible to accidentally swear when learning to count to ten. Seven - tsat - and nine - gau - are differentiated from two certain swear words by tone only. His friend Milan Kundera , a Czech expatriate writer living in France, invited him to a fancy Parisian restaurant.

Their waiter, also friends with Kundera, thought that he treated him with polite expressions in Czech like "How do you do? He told the poor waiter what had been going on. There is a story or joke about a Dutch horsebreeder conversing with an Englishman where she uses the Dutch word for breeding fokken and then mistakes the Englishman's "pardon" for the Dutch word for horses "paarden". Both fokken and fucking have the same Germanic stem in both meaning and grammar see ficken in German.

In some versions of the joke, it's the Prime Minister of the Netherlands on a state visit to the United States. Englishman : So what is it you do? Dutchwoman : I fok horses. English is an absolutely horrible language to learn due to it effectively being a hybrid Germanic- Romance - Celtic language with weird exceptions to its own grammatical rules and inconsistent pronunciation rules , so it's no surprise that non-native speakers are particularly likely to make mistakes in this language, especially if their mother tongue doesn't use the Latin alphabet.

Engrish is pretty much the epitome of this trope. Many of the problems stem from the fact that, in Japan, English looks cool and interesting, so fashion designers tend to use random English words for the sake of fashion. In those cases, it's common to use curse words and other dirty phrases.

Some clothing tends to be plastered with the word "fuck" and it's seen as nothing, and one infamous t-shirt had the phrase "Spread Beaver, exposing the vaginal area. In China, this is common on public buildings.

Some of these are relatively accurate but antiquated translations that have taken on some connotations , such as "flesh" in place of "meat" and "cock" instead of "chicken"; others might say things like "Carefully Fall Down," "Baby on Road," or "Don't Touch Yourself, Please Let Us Help You.

This is part of the problem with Backstroke of the West and its infamous "Do Not Want" — while it's a "Blind Idiot" Translation to be sure, many of the errors can be traced back to this trope.

The English signage on the Taipei subway currently warn that in the event of a mechanical problem with the train, you should "defend yourself with what you can find. A great example from a Japanese rent a car driving instructions book: "When passenger of foot heave in sight, tootle the horn.

Trumpet him melodiously at first but if he still obstacles your passage, then tootle him with vigour. Because of a combination of this and Funetik Aksent , one park named in honor of China's ethnic minorities got the ironic name of "Park of the Racists. One of the authors wrote a perfectly competent and serviceable French-to-Portuguese phrase book. The other author, who didn't speak English or French, and without the permission of the first, took that phrase book, and using a French-to-English dictionary, produced a book that offers such English phrases as "He know ride horse," "Take out the live coals with the hand of the cat," "The walls have hearsay," "That pond it seems me many multiplied of fishes," and "It want to beat the iron during it is hot.

The infamous comments of Madam Ngo Dinh Nhu, describing the Buddhist self-immolations in South Vietnam as "barbecues," may be an example of this.

According to historian Warren Carroll, Madame Nhu overheard American journalists using the word "barbecue" to describe the incidents, and, not being familiar with English and therefore, not realizing that the word was an Unusual Dysphemism , used it in a national broadcast, provoking worldwide outrage. Although one must question the veracity of this explanation, given the other offensive things Madame Nhu had said, before and since.

A student at the University of Pennsylvania had gone to a Hebrew-speaking high school. Apparently, the Hebrew word for water buffalo, behema , is slang for a thoughtless, rowdy person. And the sorority girls outside his dorm were being thoughtless and rowdy. So he poked his window out of his room and yelled, "Shut up, you water buffalo!

Thus began one of the great tempests in teapots of the s. One American soldier in World War 1 wrote about issues with some of the British and French colonial troops who spoke English poorly or not at all: someone convinced some of them that the appropriate way to behave toward an officer was to chant "Damn Fool" at him.

During World War 2 , an American airman was captured and placed in a prison camp with other captured airmen, many of whom were British.

Trying to be friendly, they kept telling him to remain hopeful and "keep his pecker up. George Carlin had a routine about "Let the daredevils ride on the plane, I'm riding in the plane". When a native English speaker tries in good faith to do a word-for-word translation into any of several other languages it's fairly common for them to accidentally imply that something is on top of the vehicle instead of the intended meaning of inside it.

Another source of preposition trouble is that the English preposition "on" can mean both "atop" as in "the spoon was on the table" and "affixed to" as in "the picture was on the wall" , where some other languages use distinct pronouns for these concepts.

This probably serves as a meta example. This leads to a confusing reading of the example until the mistake is realized. It resulted in gems such as "Squirrel institute," "President of wounds," "Arm-medical institute," and so on. Swedish music producer and songwriter Max Martin is responsible for many, many chart-topping pop hits.

However, English is not his first language, and he has made some notorious mistakes: The Britney Spears song " There was a version that made more sense, but they decided that the nonsensical version sounded better and recorded and released it anyway.

The phrase " My postillion has been struck by lightning ", while grammatically coherent , has often been used, even in the days it could have made sense , as an example of stupid, nonsensical phrases that make linguistic sense but are highly unlikely to be used outside a language learning context.

This phrase remains so infamous that other phrases like it are actually called postillion sentences by language teachers. In the Soviet and post-Soviet era, this town is well-known in Estonia for its prison. There are numerous examples of Estonian words which may sound funny or rude in Russian.

Kindergarten "Mudila" "Asshole" in Russian , for instance. A bit of an outdated example since it no longer exists is the Estonian University of Experimental Biology located at ebi. In some Tagalog dialects, "kiki" is slang for "young woman's vagina" Unfortunately it is also a Japanese name, adding new, terrible meaning to things such as Kiki's Delivery Service Conversely "puki" pronounced pookie , is used a common English pet name, but is slang for "old woman's vagina.

One Canadian working abroad in France was flustered one day when she was trying to introduce a guest around her workplace, using the word "introduire" repeatedly as she made the introductions, which on the surface sounds correct. Unfortunately, the correct way to introduce someone is to "presenter" them, as in "may I present so-and-so. The French words poisson fish and poison a toxic substance are close enough to be confused.

Fish without drink — it's poison! The French noun baiser means "a kiss. This has tripped up quite a few enthusiastic non-native speakers. In a quite hilarious case of Have a Gay Old Time , some older books have repeatedly translated "to kiss" as baiser rather than the modern embrasser.

The French word meaning "preservative" is conservateur. Hence, English speakers often seeing nothing wrong with ordering "the peas" at a restaurant, only to confuse a French waiter by ordering all the peas in the world.

A more common example is to ask for "le sel" the salt or "le poivre" the pepper , with similar results.

Properly, you ask for "du sel" and "du poivre. The correct word is massicot or massicotier after its inventor. Plein or pleine means "full" when applied to objects, so a novice French speaker who has had enough to eat might say "Je suis pleine," accidentally announcing their pregnancy. French dialects from different parts of the world frequently give different meanings to the same word. Thus, a phrase like "I give a kiss to my kids every night before going to bed" has a whole new meaning Kennedy to express solidarity with the people of Berlin during the Cold War.

A common urban legend states that the real phrase should be "Ich bin Berliner," but with the indefinite article ein added, it became "I am a jelly donut" Berliner being a type of donut originating in Berlin. The supposed error is similar to the English phrases, "I am Danish" vs. In either case, video recordings of the speech exist and the crowd clearly understands the phrase and takes it as it was meant.

Saying "Ich bin Berliner" could not. For more detail, see this page on the Other Wiki. In what may be an urban legend, a cautionary tale is told to GIs learning German. A young serviceman is in a German bar trying to pick up a lovely young lady. Note that the "ch" sound in "ich" is not the same sound as in "Nacht. If a German speaker wanted to explain what crops their farmer father grew, they might say they grew 'mice' if they didn't know that Mais translates as corn though maize would be correct, the listener was evidently not familiar with this crop.

English speakers learning German often have trouble with the sounds spelled "ie" and "ei. Similarly, "Liebchen" is a term of endearment like "sweetheart," while "Leibchen" refers to an old-fashioned undershirt.

The problem arises from the different spelling conventions of English and German: In German "ie" is always pronounced like English "ee" and "ei" like English "eye," while in English whether "ie" and "ei" are pronounced as "ee" or "eye" depends on the context e.

For instance, it is not uncommon to see the spelling "weiner" for "wiener" — in German "Wiener" pronounced "veener" means "Viennese," while "Weiner" pronounced "viner" looks like "cryer," which is actually quite close to its English near-homophone, "whiner. In the s the British manufacturer of Coventry-Climax engines discovered the hard way that "Climax" in German has only one of its several English meanings German school books tend to have fun with this.

As an example given, an English man orders a dry martini in a bar. The bartender gives him three martinis, because "dry" which in German is "trocken" sounds like the German number "drei" i. Southern Slavs often have fun with the German word "kurz" which means short. However, this is just one letter away in spelling and phonetically from the word "kurac" which means cock and is often used the way fuck is used in English, with the same level of offensiveness.

This is especially hilarious to young school goers as German is a often a mandatory subject in primary schools. During both world wars, when the Germans were questioning possible English and American Spies, they would often ask a series of rapid fire questions and listen for the wrong answers.

This worked for detecting German spies on the Allied side as well. A native German speaker would be more likely to answer "Where are you? During the Six-Day War , an Egyptian propaganda broadcaster made a small mistake in the plural form of "front" "Hazitot" , and ended up announcing that "Our forces are advancing on all bras" "Haziot".

He was considered a ripe source of amusement by the civilian population. As a result, the advertisement actually said "the tag of her earlobe that died. In a March Marie Claire article about women moving overseas for their careers, an American who moved to India describes visiting a clothing store, trying to ask the young male employees if she could see a "lehenga a type of traditional Indian outfit ," and accidentally using the word "linga phallus " instead. The capital of Nunavut, the Inuit-majority territory in the Canadian Arctic, is called Iqaluit roughly eek-kah-loo-eet ; the "q" stands for a sound that doesn't exist in English , "many fish.

In Ireland, laws have to be written in both Irish and English, and if there is divergence between them, then the Irish law is the one that becomes legally binding. In , the constitution was updated as the country had voted in a referendum and same-sex marriage had been legalised. However, a mistranslation in the law in Irish had it written as "Marriage, whether between men or women There's a story possibly apocryphal of a Christian missionary, who thought he had said "we must take up our crosses and follow Christ" during a sermon, which caused laughter amongst the congregation.

He'd apparently fallen afoul of the differing inflection problem, and was informed that while everyone knew what he meant , what he'd actually said was "we must pull up our pants and follow Christ. Apparently all the men started clapping Heroes ' Japanese-language scenes provide several examples: Masi Oka once said that while filming a scene in the first season of with George Takei, Takei's line in Japanese was paraphrasing "I am proud of your progress shinpo " that Oka misheard as "I am proud of your dick chinpo.

Another trap is that in Japanese, you can add "so" to some adjectives to mean "it looks Unfortunately for him, she probably thinks he's a stalker now. In case anyone can't watch the video or it gets taken down: The girl had recently been released from the hospital, and the guy texted her to ask if she got home okay.

The translations he gives of the Japanese sentences here are completely incorrect. Instead, its name was listed as Ryoken, or Passport. Yes, under "Real Life. No, your screen is not broken — that, for the uninitiated, is how one says "Today is a good day for opera" in Klingon.

Old English. Ethelred the Unready. It turned out that the interpretor excelled in translating written Polish, but didn't have experience with interpreting spoken Polish at full speed.

It's rarely noticed because these contexts never overlap, unless you're bringing your bicycle supplies through airport security and don't speak English very well. He recalls that a very senior man from the English Rugby Union had to respond to a speech from his Romanian counterpart, and was fretting over not knowing any of his hosts' language. Then he had a brainwave: at least he could get the words for "Ladies" and "Gentlemen" from whatever was written on the local lavatory doors.

He did this, and was gratified at the smiles and the round of applause his speech got, culminating in a standing ovation. Afterwards, the president of the Romanian Rugby Federation said to him that it had been a wonderful speech, Sir Richard, but whatever in the world possessed you to begin it with "Urinals and Water Closets?

Russian jokes about the Chinese frequently feature use of the syllable hui , which appears in both languages. In Chinese, it is used in several innocent words. In Russian, it roughly means "dick" but is far more taboo, being part of the so-called mat vocabulary. A new Chinese ambassador is to meet Gromyko. When the latter enters, the Chinese presents himself: "Zhui Hui! There is at least one website for teaching Russian that has this trope's name as one of the phrases taught.

There is an old example of machine translation well-known in Russian community where system instructions "Execute installer by tray icon and insert ms windows binaries or another os with custom mouse driver support in current boot drive" are translated into Russian as something like "Put the mounter to death by the picture of tea-tray and paste sets of two items of mistress' windows or any other mouth with customhouse support of mouse teamster in current shoe engine.

A recently published Russian "Babylonian phrase-book" IS this trope. It has the weirdest of things translated into different languages as its sole purpose. The very idea is making them sound like you've just said something wrong. Includes masterpieces like "Can I divide by zero in your country? It's worth a read. The translation engine bundled with You Tube captioning took the name of Russian architect Liubov Popova and insisted this meant, in English, Buy lube off pop-over.

Sign Language. Adam Hills has had fun with this , as did a stewardess who has enjoyed his earlier fun with sign language. Sort of. One comedian tells a story that he once choked in a restaurant, and began to flail his arms. He accidentally proposed to a deaf lady. A religion teacher for the deaf once confused the signs "to feed" and "to eat" — in telling the story of the feeding of the five thousand. This same religious teacher, in trying to sign "water," made the sign with the wrong hand, consequently signing "beer" instead.

When her audience was incredulous, she dug herself deeper, trying to sign that we need water to live, that our bodies are made mostly of water, and that the oceans are filled with water only she kept signing "beer" instead of "water". In British Sign Language, Australian Sign Language and New Zealand Sign Language collectively known as BANZSL , the sign for the letter Q index finger of the dominant hand hooked onto a ring made of the thumb and index finger of the other hand and the sign for sex index finger through the said ring are sadly easily confused by the uninitiated.

The "nanny nanny boo boo" gesture that is popular with children in America with putting the thumb on ones's nose and wagging one's fingers means "kiss my ass" in American Sign Language. One teacher told her class about how she did not know that when she was a young ASL student working with deaf children for the first time It emphasises the importance of lip pattern in British Sign Language to differentiate between similarly signed words when you learn that "Where do you live?

Hence signing "my girlfriend is 22 years old" incorrectly may get you in trouble with authorities. Spanish lesson time.

You might come across some Bad-Termometer 's making you wonder "Why is it so lousy? Likewise, buying mat kimchi in an Oriental foodstore in Sweden produces moments of hilarity — what are the other kinds of kimchi then, fodder?

Mat means "food" or "edible" in Swedish, while it means "cut" in Korean. A fire department in Scotland sent out leaflets in Urdu for people of South Asian origin describing what to do in a fire. One bulletpoint was supposed to say "Never jump straight out of a window, lower yourself onto cushions.