Incidents of In My Language, That Sounds Like... specifically involving Spanish.
- "barato" means "cheap; inexpensive" in Spanish and "cheated" in Italian.
- In Spanish "mudar" only means "to move out". It means that in Portuguese too, but with the additional meaning of "to change".
- "polvo" in Spanish means "powder" (with an additional colloquial meaning, "to have sex"). "polvo" in Portuguese means "octopus".
- "apelido" in Brazilian Portuguese means "nickname". "apellido" in Spanish means "surname". "sobrenome" in Brazilian Portuguese means "surname". "sobrenombre" in Spanish means "nickname".
- "acordar" means "to agree" in Spanish and "to wake up" in Portuguese. The French word "accorder" means "to agree", like the Spanish, but it also means "to award" and "to tune a musical instrument".
- "excitada/excitado" means "sexually aroused", not "excited" (which is "emocionado/a").
- "il burro" means "butter" in Italian. "el burro" means "donkey" in Spanish.
- "sensitivo/sensitiva" means "sensible", not "sensitive".
- Apina ("ape" in Finnish, "little bee" in Italian), Peto ("beast" in Finnish, "fart" in Italian), Kuulo ("hearing" in Finnish, sounds like Italian and Spanish "culo", "ass"), Matto (Finnish "carpet", Italian "crazy", Spanish "I kill") and Paasto ("fasting" in Finnish, while "pasto", ironically, means "meal" in Italian, and in Spanish, it means "grass").
- In Spanish seals are called focas. The other meaning of seal, as in Sealed Evil in a Can, is translated as "sello", whic can also translate to "stamp".
- In Spanish, "carpeta" means in English "folder". "Alfombra" is the actual term for "carpet".
- Urban Legend has it that the Chevy Nova just would not sell in Mexico until Chevrolet realized that in Spanish, no va is the last thing anyone wants to hear about their car: "it doesn't go." But in fact, it sold just fine. Words sounding like "nova" mean "new" in Romance languages; examples include Spanish nueva and French nouveau. Like nueva, "nova" has the accent on the first syllable; no va has it on the second. In other words, "Nova" is just as likely to be read as "doesn't go" in Spanish as "Therapist" is to be read as "The rapist" in English: not likely unless you're on "Celebrity Jeopardy!" on Saturday Night Live. That said, it is true that people in Spanish-speaking countries did make the association...as a kind of pun ("Mi Nova no va!" "Jajajajaja!").
- The above urban legend was based on the absolutely real instance where the Mitsubishi Pajero, named for a kind of small South American wildcat, had its name changed in all Spanish-speaking countries (plus the United States), where the word, pronounced locally, can mean "wanker" (the meaning of Pajero varies based on dialect; the ones where the name was changed are the ones where it's obscene—the US was included because the obscene meaning is used in Mexican Spanish).
- "Jajajajajaja" (Spanish equivalent of "hahahahahaha") also has its share of laughs: in Polish its written form translates to "memememememe" or "eggseggseggs" and even "ballsballsballs" (and not ones of the toy sort).
- A few cognates with a common meaning among Romance languages, but a different meaning in English.
- Spanish "decepción" and French "déception" actually mean "disappointment". The Italian terminology, meanwhile, might be mistaken for something else: to disappoint is "deludere" and disappointment is "delusione".
- "Actuellement", "actualmente" and "attualmente" (in French, Spanish and Italian respectively) mean "currently". (To say "actually" those languages use the equivalent for "in reality".)
- "Eventualmente" in Italian, Spanish and Portuguese and "éventuellement" in French mean "potentially".
- Due to influence on or by English, occasionally these are indeed used in a convergent way. "Actually" is sometimes used to mean "currently" in EU Business English, and "éventuellement" means "eventually" in Canadian French.
- A librairie/librería/livreria/libreria in French/Spanish/Portuguese/Italian is a bookshop. A library is a "biblioteca" (in French, "bibliothèque").
- In Spanish, "taco" means, among numerous other things
, the Mexican foodstuff, or, in Spain, "a four-letter word".- In Chile it can also mean 'traffic jam'.
- And in Mexico, where the meat-in-a-folded-corn-tortilla dish comes from, the word "taco" also means "athletic shoe." This can lead to some confusion when native Spanish speakers try to buy sneakers in English-speaking stores.
- "real" in Spanish can mean "real", but it also means "royal", as in Real Madrid and the "Real Academia Española" (the Spanish language institute).
- In Spanish, "rape" means "angler fish", "al rape" means "close-cropped" (refering to hair) and "rapé" means "snuff" (as in powdered tobacco, not Snuff Film).
- In Spanish, "to bother" or "disturb" is "molestar". To molest in the English sense is "acosar".
- In Spanish, embarazada means pregnant (although the much closer, and actually equivalent, "preñada" exists, although its use is almost exclusive to refer to animals), not "embarrassed". The equivalent for the latter is "avergonzado", although "embarazoso" does exist for "embarrassing".
- In Spanish, to have "labia" means to have a way with words. (They both derive from the Latin for "lips".)
- In Italy, Brazil, Spain, France and Portugal when a toast is made it's common to say "cin cin!"/"tim tim"/"chin chin" (pronounced "cheen cheen" -an onomatopoeia for the sound of glasses clinking together). In Japan, doing this would be very unfortunate, as "chinchin" is a childish word for "penis".
- The same goes in Mexican Spanish: Chinchin sounds like you're cursing twice. (as ¡Chin, Chin!, translated as Damn it, DAMN IT!)
- In Nigeria, there is a snack called chin chin.
- In Indonesia cincin means ring.
- Condoleezza Rice's first name is amusing for Spanish-speakers as "Condoleezza" sounds like "Condolencia" (condolence).
- English "pedo" (shorthand for "pedophile"), Spanish pedo ("fart").
- The last name of the Russian president Vladimir Putin is an endless source of comedy for many people from Spanish-speaking countries, since Putin is similar to the Spanish slur puto (Spanish for either faggot or the masculine form of "whore"). In fact, supposedly when Mr. Putin traveled to Mexico for a work tour as a President, the Mexican spokesman struggled to avoid laughing hard when presenting him to the Mexican audience.
- One ad from SKY Mexico during the 2018 World Cup played on this: at the end, the small crowd in the set began the infamous "ehh, puuutoo" chant, before the host suddenly stops halfway, gives a military salute, and says, "Putin?"
- Brazilian group Casseta & Planeta once had a skit where then-president Lula tried to use a Clean Dub Name for Putin, Prostitutin.
- Made even better by a scandal involving a party calling voters intending to vote for another party telling them their voting station has been changed ... to the address of a Poutine store. Cue political cartoons about voter's oppression in Russia under the foot of Putin (not that there has been a lot, just a little more on the socialist side) comparing voter's oppression in Canada under a box of Poutine.
- Inevitably, a restaurant named Vladimir Poutine opened in Montreal in 2017.
- Related with the previous point, Russian and Spanish had many shared words:
- "Huilo" (dickhead) sound similar to the Mexican Spanish slang "guilo" (or "guila" in feminine), which is an outdated slang for "prostitute".
- "Muda" (testicles) sound similar to either "to move (to somewhere else)", "to change clothes", or "mute woman".
- "Perestroika" (reconstruction) was a continous source for comedy in Spanish, due to the "peres" part of the word, as, pronounced phonetically, it shares the spelling as the Spanish surname "Perez", causing many people to think that "Perestroika" was pronounced as "Perez Troika", being Perez a paternal surname and Troika a maternal surname. It doesn't help that the word is considered feminine in Spanish.
- "Spasibo" (Thank you), pronounced using Russian phonetics, sounds the same like "Es pasiva" (She is passive); pronounced phonetically with Spanish phonetics, however, the word sounds the same as its masculine form (as "Es pasivo, i.e. "He is passive").
- "Debil" (moron), pronounced phonetically, sounds the same as the word for "weak".
- Spanish and Korean, while the latter not being as phonetic as Japanese is, also shares lots of words with different meanings between both languages:
- Possibly the most notorious and infamous case would be the Spanish word "Choca", which means either "to crash (something, like a car or a bike)", "Me choca" (Mexican idiom for "I hate this"), or "to give a high-five" (as "¡Choca esos cinco!") but in Korean, that word, pronounced as "jokka" in romanized Korean, sounds the same as "suck my dick" or "cocksucker", which had caused more than a problem for both Spanish-speakers and Koreans alike.
- Likewise, many Mexicans snicker at the Korean word "Chingu": In Korean, it means "friend", but when pronounced phonetically, it sounds disturbingly similar to the infamous Mexican slang "chingo", which means "to screw" or "to fuck", or, when used as an adjetive, as "a fuck-lot of (insert thing)". This is lampshaded by Mexicans and Koreans alike like hell and back, especially by the South Korean expat Youtuber Kim Su-jin, better known in Spanish as "Chingu Amiga".
- The phrase "Si, Paloma", which can be translated as either "Yes, my pidgeon" or "Yes, Paloma", being the latter a proper name in Spanish, sounds very close to "shibal", Korean for either "bitch" or "asshole".
- "Conde" (Spanish for "Count", as for Count Dracula, as an example) sound the same like the insult "Ggonde", which is used as an insult for a very arrogant, dominant person.
- "Anillo" (Ring) sound the same as "Ani yo" (Korean for "No")
- "Salsa" (Sauce) sounds similar to "Seulsa", which is Korean for "Diarrhea", which is particularly funny for both Latin Americans and Koreans alike, since the cuisine of both regions is notorious for being quite spicy and for giving diarrhea for people unaccustomed to spicy foods.
- The phrase "dice que", translated as "he/she/they say [something]" sounds similar to "that Lazy Bum" in Korean.
- The name of Brazilian soccer player Kaká sounds almost the same (without the accent) as the Latin form used in many other Romance languages (Spanish and French mainly) to say crap.
- If you think that was bad, there was another Brazilian player who played along the aforementioned Kaká named Elano, whose name in Spanish sounds exactly like The anus, causing any mention of his name along Kaká into instant comedy.note
- And there's another Brazilian player who played in Denmark named Cacá (with C rather than K). To make the things even more unfortunate for him (at least for a Spanish-speaker) he is black.
- Another Brazilian soccer player, Borracha (real name: João Fernandes Oliveira), sounds the same as the Mexican Spanish word for drunken woman. The player is male.
- Pelé sounds the same as the past form of the Spanish word for To peel something and also as a Mexican slang for both to escape and to give a damn. Another former Brazilian star, Tostão (referencing a coin, derived from the French Teston) sounds like Mexican accented Portuguese for toasted.
- Alexandre Pato, yet another Brazilian soccer player, is another unfortunate example, at least in Puerto Rican Spanish: While Pato is normally translated as "duck", in Puerto Rico his surname is a local slang for "fag".
- In an non-Spanish example, there is a former Brazilian player and currently manager named Argel Fucks (last name pronounced "foocks"), which caused some hilarity in English-speaking media, especially on some headlines, being the most hilarious one "Fucks off to Benfica". This is one of the reasons he is normally addressed by his first name instead.
- Other foreign soccer players had funny-sounding names in Spanish besides Portuguese ones:
- Italian soccer player Simone Vergassola's surname is quite... problematic to pronounce in Spanish, especially in the Mexican dialect, because it sounds like solitary cock.
- Another Italian, Christian Panucci, is also problematic to spell in Mexico, as his surname sounds disturbingly close to "panocha" which is a very vulgar slang for the women's nether parts.
- Romanian soccer player Bănel Nicoliţă's surname sounds similar if pronounced without diacritics to "mi colita", which is translated as "my dick" (Spain) and "My ass" (Mexico and many Latin American countries).
- Ciprian Marica, another Romanian player, is even worse, as his surname means "fag" in Spain and "coward" in Mexico, albeit it also means the same as in Spain. This is the reason he played with his name on his shirt instead of his surname during his time at Getafe CF in Spain.
- Patxi Puñal, a Spaniard player of Basque origin, has his surname means as both "dagger" in Spain and also a vulgar slang for a gay person in Mexico.
- Cameroon-born player Pierre Webó's surname sounds similar to "huevo", as both "egg" and also the slang for "testicles". The fact the accent is placed in the O means it also sounds like "huevón", a Latin American slang for "idiot".
- Another player from Cameroon, Nicholas Nkoulou (also spelled N'Koulou), caused much hilarity when he went to Italy and signed for Torino FC, since his surname in Italian sounds almost like "in culo", meaning "in the ass".
- In a similar topic, there's no shortage of cities and towns in Spain with funny-sounding names, due to the many languages spoken in that country, so this trope applies to them:
- Venta de Baños, a small city in the Palencia province, sounds exactly as "Bathroom Sales" in Spanish. The name came from the Ancient Spanish word for "village" for the word "venta", which was near to Baños de Cerrato, another Spaniard town.
- El Meadero de la Reina: (Literally, "The Queen's Pissdump"), an small slum near Puerto Real, in Cadiz. The name came from when the then-Queen Isabel II decided to make an emergency stop there to pee in that place. Originally it was named El descansadero de la venta caída (The Resting Place of the Downed Village), but after that event, the place changed its name.
- Villapene (lit. "Penisville"). Named after a Roman soldier named Penus who lived there. Located in Galicia.
- Parderrubias: (lit. "A couple of blondies"). Another Galician town. Notable because Martin Sheen's father, Francisco Estévez Martínez, hailed from there.
- Guarromán (lit. "Dirtyman"). A small town from the Andalucia province. Ironically enough, the name is a adaptation of its original Arabic name, Uādī-r-Rommān, (River of Pomegranates), but for some bizarre reason it was translated to that name. Their residents are very aware of how funny the name of their town sounds and they love to make fun of it.
- Probably the most hilarious (or offensive) one, especially for Spanish speakers from outside Spain and especially Mexico, would be a small town in Catalonia named "Berga" (with B, while the Latin American word is normally spelled with a "V", but the pronounciation is the same) which means invariably as "cock", causing lots of hilarity among Mexicans when someone asks if they travelled there, as the answer invariably would be in Spanish "Fui a Berga" (I went to Berga), but if you add the article "la", it would sound like "me fui a la Berga" (I went to fuck myself/I went to hell). This is even worse if you use the Spanish translation of the Catalonian name, "Ciutat de Berga" (Berga City), as interpreted in Mexican Spanish would be "Ciudad de verga" (Shitty city/Shantytown). In Spain the word itself doesn't mean anything there and they found weird when they see many Mexican tourists laughing like hyenas at hearing that name.
- In fact, Spain had thousands of towns with these names, some varying from the commonplace(La Pera, Ajo, Maria, etc), to the more unusual (Malcocinadonote , Dios Le Guardenote , Humilladeronote ) and even some offensive ones (Senonote , Alcantarillanote , El Pitonote , Calamocosnote and the already mentioned towns.)
- Venta de Baños
- "Toda Raba" means "thank you" in Hebrew. In Spanish it would sound, when changing the gender of the words to male, to "Todo (el) Rabo", i.e. "All the Tail/Ass", through in some dialects, it also sounds like "All (the) Dick". Without changing the gender, it sounds like "All the fried squid".
- The high-IQ group Mensa chose its name because it means "table" in Latin, symbolizing the coming together of equals, but didn't foresee a Mexican chapter of Mensa... and mensa means "note moron" in Mexican Spanish. "¿Eres mensa?" means "Are you dumb?".
- Italian penne (a kind of pasta) sounds like the Spanish word pene (penis), also an endless source for dirty jokes, especially when the aforementionated dish is cooked.
- "Pene" is the Italian word for "penis" too, but since Italian distinguishes between short and long consonants ("penne" having a longer-sounding "n") there is no innuendonote .
- In the early 90s, the forward of Valencia CF was made of Bulgarian Penev, Spanish Poyatos and Brazilian Viola. The three sound the same, or very close in Spanish to "penis", "cock" and "(he) rapes". The Spanish comedy site Viruete refers to this as the time Valencia played ballsy.
- Penélope Cruz is sometimes shortened to "Pene" in America. Not so in Spain.
- The Russian name Серге́й (Sergey, [sʲɪˈrʲɡʲej]) sounds like Spanish ser gay [sɛr ɡej], "to be gay". Now imagine that your last name is also Putin (little faggot).
- The first line of the chorus of Greek Cypriot singer Mixalis Xatzigiannis' song "Pies" means in Greek (paraphrased): Drink! Drink to the bottom! but to a Spanish speaker it sounds like: Feet! Have you tasted feet?.
- In Spanish, Mario Puzo sounds like Mario Puso (Mario put that...).
- Piña means pineapple in Spanish, in Hungarian pina refers to female genitals (also used as a harsh insult). When it comes to the cocktail, Hungarians rarely pronounce it the Spanish way.
- The Israeli airline El Al sounds like saying The To the in Spanish.
- A very common error in English-Spanish translations is assuming that billion in English and billón in Spanish mean the same. They do not, as Spanish-speaking countries use the long scale rather than the short scale. Billion is a thousand millions (10^9), while billón is a million millions (10^12, or trillion in English). A correct translation is that the English billion is "mil millones" in Spanish (literally "a thousand million"), or the less common "millardo".
- Same system is actually used in most European countries (in Croatia: milijun, milijarda, trilijun, trilijarda).
- This is actually due to an error in American Newspapers around the year 1910. Numbers on the order of 10^9 were uncommon in daily use, but governmental budgets were approaching this number. Mathematically illiterate newspaper authors incorrectly called 10^9 one billion, instead of the English term one milliard. It took about 40 years for Britain to switch to what is now called the short billion system, where 10^9 is a billion and 10^12 is a trillion, but before Americans messed up, English speakers in both countries used what is now called the long billion system, where 10^9 is a milliard, 10^12 is a billion, 10^15 is a billiard, and so on.
- The same goes with the definition of the word "mediocre" in either English and Spanish: While in English that word stands for something that is just OK, but neither good or excellent, in Spanish that word stands exclusively for something either beyond terrible or just awful.
- Barcelona's main airport is named El Prat after the nearby city of about 64,000, but "prat" is also British slang for "fool".
- The name of the ruler of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mobutu Sese Seko, sounds extremely funny for Spanish speakers, since his last name (Sese Seko) sounds like Seso Seco (Dried Brain) or se secó (it dried).
- Tupelo is the name of a city in the state of Mississippi, but for a Spanish speaker it sounds like the Spanish words for "your hair". If there's people living in your hair maybe you have been delaying going to the barbershop for a little too long...
- In Russian Tupelo means "it was becoming dumb".
- Maman is the Japanese slang equivalent of the phrase MILF. In Spanish, especially in the Mexican dialect, Maman is a slang for they can suck a... (noun)
- Spanish-speakers travelling to English-speaking countries are often advised not to say that they're "constipated" if they catch a cold, as the English word has quite a different meaning from Spanish "constipado".
- Both Detroit and the Alcatraz prison sounds funny in Spanish, since Detroit sounds phonetically similar to "detras" (behind/rear, but it's also an euphemism for "butt") and Alcatraz sounds like "atras" (which means the same thing as "detras"), making both places as the butt (no pun intended) of all kind of ass-related jokes:
- There's a Scottish football (soccer) player of African origin named Karamoko Dembele, whose first name sounds like "snot face" in Spanish.
- "curva" (the Italian, Spanish and Portuguese word for "curve") sounds like "kurva", the word for "whore" in many Slavic languages. Incidentally, in Scandinavian countries the word also means "curve" but is spelled exactly like the Slavic version.
- The word "ser" in Spanish means "to be". In Polish "ser" (written and pronounced exactly the same way) means "cheese".
- More than one Spanish-speaking Jew had to tolerate the fact that the name of the famous Jewish rite of the Bar Mitzvah sounds like the name of a bar, in the sense of a place where alcoholic beverages are served. It should be noted that this only applies to the Spanish language, where bar names always begin with "Bar (name of the place)", which causes much confusion for a Gentile who does not know the etymology of the word:Jewish person: I went to a Bar Mitzvah with my family yesterday.noteGentile: I see, I also went to the "bar" close to my house last week.note
- In a similar way, the above also happens with the name of the Israeli actress and model Bar Rafaeli (or anyone with the name "Bar") for the same reasons in Spanish.
- The Spanish idiom "No hay de que" (You're welcome) sounds like the shorthand for "No, I Don't Know".
- "Sonrisa", despite the resemblance to "sunrise", is Spanish for "smile".
- The common Spanish short form of the name Enrique is Quique, and it's not unfrequent that bearers of the name choose to spell it Kike ("kEEk-eh"), either being unaware of the slur or unconcerned by it because it does not exist in Spanish. Unsuspecting Anglo-Saxon observers may be led to believe that the person calling himself that is either a racist or an extremely self-loathing Jew.
- In January 2021, Uruguayan football player Edinson Cavani was banned for three games in the English Premier League for using the word "negrito" to reply a message on Instagram. While "negro" is a derogative term for black people in Englishnote , in the Rioplatense Spanish dialect, spoken in Uruguay and certain regions in Argentina, "negrito" is a term of endearment, and is not necessarily used to refer to black people. What Cavani was doing in his reply was thanking a follower.
- Spanish-speaking people that are trying to learn English are often confused at the fact that the English word "sensible" (which also exists in Spanish, but has a different meaning) is actually translated as "sensato", and "sensitive" (which sounds fairly similar to the aforementioned "sensato") is translated as the Spanish "sensible".
- "presunto" is a noun meaning "ham" in Portuguese and an adjective meaning "presumably" in Spanish. As seen on Tumblr, a brand of crisps writes the flavour in both Portuguese and Spanish, and ends up saying something like "ham — presumably" in Spanish.
- One of the basic libraries for the C programming language is conio.h. That is, Console Input/Output. It's not difficult, however, for a Spanish speaker to notice that, when pronounced in said language, it becomes an homophone to "coño", equivalent to the English "pussy".
- There have been some automobile models whose names, in Spanish, get a completely different (and undesirable) meaning:
- The Japanese-only Nissan Moco is written exactly like "mucus" (in singular).
- The Volkswagen Jetta happens to sound just like "jeta", which, depending on the region, can mean "face", "pig snout", "lips" or "shameless".
- The Kia Mohave's original name, Borrego, is written exactly like "sheep".
- The Audi Q3 sounds like "cutres", "lame" in plural.
- If you remove the "P" from the Volkswagen Polo GT's name, you get something that sounds like "ojete", slang for "ass".
- The Mitsubishi Pajero had to be rebranded as Montero in Spanish-speaking countries because "pajero" means "wanker".
- The Fiat Marea gets its name from the Italian word for "tide", and the word also has that meaning in Spanish. Problem is, "marea" is also the third-person conjugation for the verb "marear", "make [someone] dizzy". It can be quite the Meaningful Name for people who get dizzy while travelling in such a car.
- The Spanish word for "black" (the colour) is "negro". This has led to several embarrassing incidents on Twitter: Crayola labels their crayons in several languages, including Spanish, and as a result have been accused of racism by ignorant Americans. In response to these accusations Crayola tweeted an explanation of the word's meaning in Spanish.
- The Spanish word for "here", aqui, is Hebrew for "I will vomit". However, it cuts both ways: The Hebrew word for "broomstick", matate, is Spanish for "kill yourself".
- "Matate" is also a valid surname in Japanese, which cause lots of unintended hilarity when the name is written in Asian or Western orders.
- An intra-language example: in Spain "coger" means "to catch", but in Latin America it means "to screw" (as in make love to). Hilarity Ensues when Spanish-speaking Latin Americans hear Spaniards say what to them means "I'm gonna screw the bus!"
- Tied with the Spanish equivalent of El Spanish "-o", Spanish-speaking tourists in Brazil might find themselves surprised that "camisinha" (which sounds like "camisita", "little shirt") actually means "condom".
- If you go to a restaurant in Argentina and you ask for some "chivito", you'll be greeted with a serving of goat meat ("chivito" meaning "baby goat"). If you ask for some "chivito" in an Uruguayan restaurant, instead, you'll be greeted with a meat sandwich where said meat is generally from a cow.
- The WWII Japanese fleet carrier "Kaga" is often source of snickers, as "Kaga" in Spanish sounds like "caga" ("(s)he shits").
- The word "con" simply means "with" in Spanish, but is a perennial source of amusement to French students, as it means "dumbass", "jerkass" or even "cunt" depending on context (though the first is the most widespread, to the point where Bart Simpson uses it in the French dub).
- "decepción" can mean "deception", but it more commonly means "disappointment".
- The Spanish word for "left" is "izquierda". In Japanese that sounds like "the chair disappears" (isu kieruda, 椅子消えるだ).
