D’oh. I mean, would you believe “Of course I knew that, I was just faithfully reporting someone else’s mistake?”
Hmmm… I must be sleeping because I can’t think of any specifically Quebec French words for “vagina” or “vulva” right now. Which ones did you have in mind?
:o
I can remember in the early 80s going over to an Iranian friend’s house and having dinner, when the news turned to sports and was talking about boxer Gerry Cooney. Everyone at the table started laughing hysterically, as ‘Cooney’ is apparently the Farsi word for “asshole”.
I’m told the English word “mushy” sounds just like a German slang term for female genitalia, pretty much the equivalent to “pussy” in English. A friend of mine has a hilarious story about the time she was visiting a friend in Germany and one morning tried to describe how she liked her oatmeal.
Our fitness trainer Gary would have a hard time in Japan, as I understand his name to sound exactly like the Japanese name for diarhea.
A strict pronounciation of Valdimir Putin’s name in French would sound exactly like a word for a whore (putain), so they pronounce it like a dish of fries served with melted chese and gravy instead; poutine.
In Spanish a pipa is a seed encased in a shell (sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds) or a pipe (as in the smoking implement, not the tubes).
A common Spanish nickname for Enrique (Henry) is Quique or Kike. It’s not pronounced like the derogatory term at all (more like KEEkeh, if I’m not getting my phunics too off).
OTOH, for English terms that mean something bad in Spanish I’m drawing a blank. There’s yo good olde false friends, but that’s a different problem.
Chicago sounds like ‘I crap on you’ in Portuguese.
I know you’re joking, but FWIW, “Putin” is the common English transliteration of the Russian PM’s name while “Poutine” is its common French transliteration. Same thing for “Yeltsin”/“Eltsine” and most other Russian words. They’re transliterated in such a way that the pronunciation in the target language approximates the correct Russian pronunciation.
This has lead to questions about how to write the names of Russian hockey players. The common “Latin” spelling of their names is usually the English transliteration, so when I was working at Ottawa’s Le Droit newspaper, we were instructed to modify the spelling of their names in articles coming from news agencies to uniformize it and make it closer to French orthography. “Alexei Yashin”, for example, became “Alexeï Yashine”. But that’s arguably even worse, since that’s neither the English nor the French transliteration. The letter cluster ‘sh’ doesn’t exist in French, for one. The actual French transliteration of this player’s name would have been closer to “Alexeï Iachine”, which just looks weird.
On the other hand, I think I’ve recently read a (probably Russian) name on a hockey jersey that looked like it had been transliterated the French way. I don’t remember which player it was, unfortunately.
The Swedish manual for the videogame Halo says that a certain button when in a vehicle gives “Extra Fart”.
The Arabic for penis is “zib”, which is close enough to “zip” as makes no never mind. Making ZipCars amusing, and leading to an anecdote related to me by someone who was teaching English to Arabic-speaking elementary school students. They were working from a British book and had come to the section on the mail. Discussing postal codes, she said, “In England, they call them post codes, but in the US we call them…” and then her brain kicked in and she realized that she was about to say “penis codes” which probably would have put an end to any productive activity in class that day “… postal codes.”
Oh and “Pitt” means “Dick” in Swedish, making Brad Pitt a rather unfortunate name.
The Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory [AMGOT] in WW2 was eventually renamed AMG after the Turkish delegate to the fledging United Nations pointed out that it meant something rude in Turkish. The late Fritz Spiegel, seeking confirmation of this story, contacted the Turkish military attaché at the Embassy, who, once he had stopped laughing, said “There is no such word in Turkish”. Neither could a waiter in a Turkish restaurant assist him. The BBC’s Turkish language service came to the rescue, supplying the information:- am [cunt] got [arse]
In this context it means extra speed.
He is aware of it. 
A friend of mine once claimed he had told him.
The name of the nude musical Oh! Calcutta is actually an Anglicized version of the French "Oh! Quelle Cnt Tu A." (Oh, What a Cnt you have.)
Remember Apu saying that when he was Manjula were getting ready to do the deed?
Several Northern English accents would approximate that French sound- Newcastle for example.
I had heard (I am of an age to have seen the musical on its original performance in London) that it was from the Latin for ‘What an ass you have’- at least that was what was said then.
ETA Wikipedia agrees using the English ‘arse’.
Frenchie here, and I confirm Wiki : it’s “Oh, quel cul t’as !”, “cul” meaning buttocks.
I know mate, I speak Swedish 
And another FWIW, “poutine”, the name of the dish, derives I believe from a particular pronunciation of “pudding”. No connection to the Russian PM.
Care to share why with the rest of the class?
Yup. When I was studying abroad in Tokyo, a fellow exchange student (Scottish) made very sure to emphasize to all of us that we should pronounce his name as GAH-ree.