History Main / ThisIsMyNameOnForeign

* ''LetsPlay/EmpiresSMP'' Season 2: The previously-unnamed sunflower deity venerated in Sausage's old kingdom is honoured as "Santa Perla" in Sanctuary. However, that in itself is a Spanish translation as both regions are explicitly based on Latin America, and [[spoiler:the original historical figure [[AscendToAHigherPlaneOfExistence who became Santa Perla]] was the Farmer Queen [=PearlescentMoon=] of Gilded Helianthia (from Season 1 of the series), who spoke English/Common and not Spanish.]] Sausage uses both the original English and translated Spanish names interchangably for the most part.

* On the ''LetsPlay/DreamSMP'', upon initiation into the now-dissolved faction of El Rapids, characters were often called by their names translated into Spanish to signify their membership in the faction. Those with names that don't directly translate across (mainly because of the use of {{Screen Name}}s) usually have the title "Señor" tacked in front of their names.[[note]]To clarify, the usage of the masculine title isn't due to misogyny, but because there weren't a lot of women on the server in the first place to give the feminine title to.[[/note]] Mexican Dream, a mysterious entity associated with the faction, also had a tendency to address characters with their names in Spanish, even if they weren't part of El Rapids.

*** Agricola = Bauer (farmer, peasant)
*** Faber, Fabricius = Schmidt, Schmid etc. (smith)

*** Sartorius = Schneider, Schröder (tailor)
*** Sutor = Schuhmacher (shoemaker)
*** Textor = Weber (weaver)

*** Neander = Neumann (new man)
*** Xylander = Holzmann (wood-man)

* In the ''Literature/{{Dracula}}'' novel, the title character poses as a Count de Ville (Dracula = "son of the [[strike:Devil]] Dragon", de Ville = Devil - [[DontExplainTheJoke get it?]].

* In ''[[VideoGame/CastlevaniaChroniclesOfSorrow Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow]]'' [[VideoGame/CastlevaniaChroniclesOfSorrow and]] ''[[VideoGame/CastlevaniaChroniclesOfSorrow Dawn of Sorrow]]'', Alucard shows up under the [[PaperThinDisguise pseudonym]] "Genya Arikado". The last name is just altering his name to fit Japanese pronunciation.

* Dr. Johann Schmidt from the ''AudioPlay/BigFinishDoctorWho'' Seventh Doctor audios ''Recap/BigFinishDoctorWho025Colditz Colditz'' and "[[Recap/BigFinishDoctorWho131SurvivalOfTheFittest Dr. Klein's Story]]" turns out to have been John Smith before he was stranded in Germany. [[spoiler:As in "John Smith", the name the Doctor gives for himself when he can't get away with not giving a name — he's an AlternateUniverse Eighth Doctor.]]

* Talia from the ''Franchise/{{Batman}}'' comics is the daughter of Ra's al Ghul whose name means "The Demon's Head". When she took over ComicBook/LexLuthor's company, she used the alias 'Talia Head' ([[PretentiousPronunciation using the English pronunciation of the surname 'Heed']]).

* In one of the Last 52 universes in ''Comicbook/DarkNightsDeathMetal'', the chief pychiatrist at a surprisingly cheerful and non-BedlamHouse-seeming Arkham Asylum is named Gottlieb, and claims to have no connection to Amadeus Arkham. After the asylum's dark secret has been revealed, he notes that Gottlieb and Amadeus mean the same thing ("beloved of God").
* ''Magazine/DoctorWhoMagazine'': In "Instruments of War", the 12th Doctor enters Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's tent, flashing his psychic paper and announcing himself as Dr. Johann Schmidt: the German version of his GoToAlias of 'Dr. John Smith'. As it happens, Rommel is one the people strong-minded enough to resist the physic paper's effect, but enough weird stuff is going on that a madman waving an empty wallet in his face barely registers.

-->'''Person:''' Doctor who?\\

* The creator of ''VideoGame/{{Fez}}'', Philippe Poisson, is French-Canadian. He goes by the nickname Phillip "Phil" Fish, a literal English translation.

* In one of the Last 52 universes in ''Comicbook/DarkNightsDeathMetal'', the chief pychiatrist at a surprisingly cheerful and non-BedlamHouse-seeming Arkham Asylum is named Gottlieb, and claims to have no connection to Amadeus Arkham. After the asylum's dark secret has been revealed, he notes that Gottlieb and Amadeus mean the same thing ("beloved of God").

* In ''Film/theLivingDaylights'', the false Soviet passport Koskov and Whitaker to smuggle Bond out of Tangier bears the name "Jerzy Bondov".

[[caption-width-right:350:[[TheNameIsBondJamesBond the name is Bondov. Jerzy Bondov]]]]

* Dr. Johann Schmidt from the ''AudioPlay/BigFinishDoctorWho'' Seventh Doctor audios "Colditz" and "Klein's Story" turns out to have been John Smith before he was stranded in Germany. [[spoiler:As in "John Smith", the name the Doctor gives for himself when he can't get away with not giving a name — he's an AlternateUniverse Eighth Doctor.]]

* In the ''Literature/BenSnow'' short story "The Trail of the Golden Cross" by Edward D. Hoch, the Mexican {{Bandito}} Zanja turns out to really be a white man named Cole Fosse; Zanja and Fosse being the Spanish and French, respectively, for 'ditch'.

* In the Literature/PhryneFisher novel ''Away With The Fairies'', [[spoiler:John Bell]] turns out to be [[spoiler:an Italian named Giovanni Campana]].

* Old Shatterhand, the fictional avatar of writer Creator/KarlMay, is always called "Charlie" (usually spelled phonetically: ''Scharlih'') by his good friend, the Apache chief Literature/{{Winnetou}}. The Arabian version in the Literature/OrientCycle goes by name "Kara ben Nemsi", "Karl the son of Germans".
* ''Literature/ThePrespaTetralogy'' ''The Iron Candlestick'': An InvertedTrope with Sultana, a Bulgarian who is named after the ruler of the Ottoman empire (the Sultan) and her granddaughter Tzareva, named after her but referring to the ruler (Tzar) of the Bulgarian empire of old.

* Common in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, people of international fame (like physicians or astronomers) latinized their names or adapted them to host country's language when travelling.
** The famous Flemish Renaissance anatomist Andreas Witinck went by the name of Andreas Vesal (after the town Wesel where his family was from) which was latinized into Andreas Vesalius.
** The 11th century Persian physician, philosopher, astronomer and alchemist Abū Alī al-Husayn ibn Abdullāh ibn Sīnā became known in Europe as Avicenna.

* During the First World War, the English members of the noble family of Battenberg - a side-branch of the ruling house of the Grand Duchy of Hessen in Germany - anglicized their their family name to Mountbatten.

** Just within Chinese itself there is a lot of this due to all the different pronunciations of the Hanzi in different dialects/languages. To help prevent confusion, police records store suspects names orthographically rather than phonetically, frequently using a telegraphing code that would have otherwise gone obsolete decades ago.

* We don't know what the original surname of Nicolaus Copernicus was, since Copernicus is clearly a latinized version of what was originally in Polish or German (and possibly related to the once-large copper industry in his ancestral region of Silesia, although some contend that it may have been related to the wild dill plant, or ''kopernik'' in Polish, common in Silesia.). This was a contributing factor to the still recurring dispute as to his "correct" nationality.

* Even as late as the 1970s, Swiss confectionery and foodstuffs firm Nestlé accepted that monoglot Brits whose language has no accented letters would not know how to pronounce "Nestlé" as it should be in French. So even in TV adverts, the firm's name was prounced as if it were the English word "nestle"[[note]] "as ''nessle''[[/note]], with a silent "t" and no accented "é" on the end. Old TV adverts preserve this Anglicised pronunciation, possibly accepting that the Brits would not recognise a poncy foreign affectation like a French grave-accented "e" and would always recognise the chocolate as being called "Nestle". It's only comparatively recently that TV advertising began using the correct ''nest-ley" pronunciation. Weirdly, the United States (which is reputedly even worse with foreign languages than Britain) never got this; their famous 1950s commercials for Quik chocolate milk powder featuring ventriloquist Jimmy Nelson ([[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQK-AJKtjB0 sample]]) all use an approximation of the correct pronunciation (the "t" gets a bit lost and the final "e" sound is a bit Americanized, but it is pronounced).

*** In an inversion of the above, a man in New York City (I believe - it was a radio story) was the target of anti-Muslim crime. He was an immigrant from the Middle East who'd changed his name to fit in better. In NYC, that means his name was something along the lines of Stanley H. Rosenberg.

* The title character of ''Marjorie Morningstar'' was born Morgenstern, one of those immigrants who translated her name.

* In ''The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel)'', the characters deduce a connection between the horse Christmas Bells and Mrs. Carillon's missing husband Noel:

* In ''Literature/{{Stravaganza}}'', the young protagonists from modern-day Britain get Italian names when they begin to travel to the land of [[IstanbulNotConstantinople Talia.]] A [[AwesomeMcCoolname particular winner]] of this linguistic lottery is Sky Meadows, now dubbed "Celestino Pascoli."

* In ''Radio/TheShadow 1941: Hitler's Astrologer'' graphic novel, the Nazi officer Col. Friedrich Wolff is revealed to be a renegade Russian army officer named Ivan Fedorovich Volko.

* ''Series/FatherBrown'': In "The Island of Dreams", Father Brown that Sandy Beauchamp's surname is the French for 'Fairfield': the surname of the boy who had drowned at the holiday camp 15 years earlier.

* ''Series/Kaamelott'':

* ''Manga/BusoRenkin'': Before he became a [[OurHomunculiAreDifferent humanoid hommunculus]] and took on the name Papillon, French for butterfly, the character had the family name of Chouno. The "chou" is Japanese for butterfly, the "no" is just there to make it a surname. His grandfather had the same surname, and opted to just translate it, nameing himself Doctor Butterfly.

* In the wake of the Bulgarian national revival in the 19th century, many people did the inverse (This Is My Name On Native"), choosing the Slavic versions of popular Greek names (Greek culture had previously been seen as superior and Hellenisation was a trend for a while). Hence the joke "we named him Svetlyo, after his grandpa Lambi". Svetlyo is a name coming from the Slavic root "svet-" (light) and Lambi (as well as the word "lamp") comes from greek "lampo", meaning the same.

A character chooses an alias by translating his name into some foreign language, which may be [[LampshadeHanging lampshaded]] as [[LazyAlias uninspired]]. See also YouAreTheTranslatedForeignWord.

A character chooses an alias by translating his name into some foreign language. See also YouAreTheTranslatedForeignWord.

If the character's name is changed because the work ''itself'' is being translated into a foreign language, it's a DubNameChange. When a character or family emigrates to a new country and changes their name permanently, it's a NaturalizedName.

* Talia from the ''Franchise/{{Batman}}'' comics is the daughter of Ra's al Ghul whose name means "The Demon's Head". When she took over ComicBook/LexLuthor's company, she used the alias 'Talia Head' ([[ItsPronouncedTroPAY using the English pronunciation of the surname 'Heed']]).

* The Norvegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik went on English-speaking forum by the name Andrew Berwick.