The Translation Convention in animated movies.
- Any animated work featuring animals as the main characters will have the animals speak human language when left alone, but will revert back to speaking animal language if they see humans.
- Lampshaded in Asterix and Cleopatra: The reason why the Egyptians seem to speak the same language as everyone else including the audience, according to the narrator, is because they have been dubbed for the convenience of the viewers who would most certainly not understand ancient Egyptian (demonstrated by an Egyptian talking, accompanied by cartouches standing in for speech bubbles). Occasionally, so it is also explained, there might be differences between the sound and the lip movements, but lip syncing wasn't as advanced in ancient times as it is today.
- Half the dialogue in Atlantis: The Lost Empire involving the Atlantean language has Translation Convention, while the other half is in subtitled Atlantean.
- The Disney Animated Canon does this a lot, what with these films taking place in many different countries but being shown all over the world and thus re-dubbed into many languages other than the ones the characters should logically be speaking.
- There are versions of Beauty and the Beast and The Hunchback of Notre Dame in English and many other languages besides French, even though both are set in France.
- The Lion King, Lady and the Tramp, Brother Bear, The Rescuers, and Oliver & Company feature talking animals.
- Strangely done in Pocahontas. For almost the entire movie both the Algonquians and the Brits speak English. However, when John meets the title character, she speaks Algonquin — until the magic tree tells her to "listen with [her] heart", at which point she can understand Smith. The film indicates that Smith and Pocahontas' spiritual connection is the only reason they understand each other, as neither character is shown directly speaking to anyone else from the other's group.
- In the second Mulan movie, Mushu tells Mulan some rather alarming news, which she parrots back at him in shock, and he irritably asks, "Don't you speak Chinese?"
- It's unlikely the characters in Frozen are speaking English. The country Elsa rules over is based on Norway so it's probable they're speaking a fictional version of Norwegian. Despite this, "Frozen Fever" has a "Happy Birthday" banner written in English, and Frozen II briefly features written text from Elsa and Anna's mother, which also happens to be in English.
- This is potentially the case in Moana. In the song We Know the Way, her ancestors are only shown singing along during the Tokelauan part at the beginning. When the lyrics switch over to English or whatever language the movie was translated into, the singing shifts to disembodied background voices. This detail suggests that the characters are actually speaking Tokelauan and that the translation is just for our convenience.
- Tarzan depicts ape and other animal languages in a translation convention. However, when Tarzan speaks to an animal in the presence of the other human characters, it's rendered as animal sounds.
- This trope is invoked with Isle of Dogs, which is set in Japan. The film begins with an onscreen message explaining that, for the viewers' convenience, the dogs' barking has been translated into English, but the human characters' Japanese dialogue has not. The only two human characters in the film who speak English are actually speaking it in-universe.
- Kung Fu Panda: The characters are naturally speaking some sort of Classical Chinese (rather than this being a reality where modern English happens to be the universal language), especially since all the written text is Chinese calligraphy. This doesn't explain the diversity of accents in their English-rendered dialogue though, with some Chinese, but others mostly American or British.
- Played with in The Land Before Time V: The Mysterious Island. Although most movies, including the fifth movie, had the dinosaurs speaking English, the Sharpteeth spoke in growls and snarls, with subtitles translating the conversation.
- In Madagascar, the animals can understand humans, but not vice-versa. At one point, when Marty goes missing, Alex makes a panicked phone call to the police, but all the responder hears is a lion roaring, indicating that rather than them being Talking Animals, their Animal Talk has been rendered as English.
- In Night on the Galactic Railroad, while the dialogue is in Japanese (or English, or whatever), the background text is in Esperanto, so presumably that's what the characters are speaking.
- In the Tinker Bell films, Tink speaks English as do all fairies, a stark contrast to the jingling bell sounds made by the mute Tink in the Disney Peter Pan movies. You can imagine how that went over. However, when Tink leaves Pixie Hollow and meets a human, when she tries to communicate, we find that the human hears only jingling when she talks. This makes all fairy dialogue that we can understand Translation Convention — they do talk, but humans just can't understand.
- Pixar delves into this with Ratatouille and Coco, its love letters to foreign countries:
- Ratatouille is set entirely in France, but everyone only speaks English (with the majority of the human characters having French accents). Similarly to the Madagascar example above, when the rats are shown speaking from a human character's point of view, all we hear is a bunch of squeaking. Weirdly, Linguini, the only prominent human character with an American accent, treats the dialogue as if it's in English, such as hesitantly responding "Oui" or cockily greeting Colette with a gratuitous "Bonjour, ma cherie" even though, by the film's logic, he's actually been speaking French for the whole film.
- Coco. Set in Mexico, all the characters speak perfect English but with Mexican accents. However unlike Ratatouille, which used only a handful of French phrases, some 20% of Coco's dialogue is in Spanish. According to Word of God, this use of Translation Convention represents the Mexican Spanish dialect which, due to proximity to the United States, is peppered with English.
- The Prince of Egypt: The spoken dialogue is always English, rather than Egyptian or Hebrew, and it isn't always clear which is being translated. A verse of the song "When You Believe" is sung in Hebrew, but it's otherwise English. The general rule is that the Egyptian royals speak with British accents, while the Hebrews have American accents (including Moses, despite him having been mostly raised by Egyptians).
- Sky Blue's original dialogue is all in Korean, but the background text is all in English. Given the ending, it seems that they are in fact speaking English throughout the film.
- Steamboy is set in Victorian Britain, but all of the characters speak Japanese, presumably under this convention.
- In Turning Red, Mei's family are shown speaking perfect English with no accent even at home while watching a Cantonese drama on TV with Chinese subtitles. The only time they don't speak English onscreen is the Cantonese chanting they do during the red moon ritual. In the Novelization, Mei narrates that she knows a lot of Cantonese but her family never speaks Mandarin at home (and therefore they do speak Cantonese at home). These details imply Translation Convention is effect for the dialogue during the scenes at the Lee family home and within Chinatown though not elsewhere given that the film takes place in Toronto, Canada.
Exceptions
- Curiously averted in The Sky Crawlers: all the main characters speak Japanese and have Japanese names, despite of the setting, which is the European Confederation, but they switch to English when flying their planes or speaking to tourists, while the few locals seen in Krakow speak passable Polish. It's never explained why all these Japanese people are fighting an air war in Europe, since the corporate entity they represent appears to be British, or at least primarily Anglophone.
