Only a long-ago Russian major would...

keep reading the location, "Eugene, Oregon," as "Evgeny Onegin."
It's making me a little nuts because I'm reading non-fiction about some occurances there and everytime I stumble mentally!

I sometimes misread English words as Chinese pinyin. Moping, name, change, etc. become mo-ping, na-me and chan-ge (or chang-e).

I can understand that. I remember, too, my friend Sara hated that an organization called CAPA used to leave posters around campus, because that spelled her name in Cyrillic and always caught her eye even though she knew it wasn't really meant to be her name.

But the Pushkin thing just kept cracking me up because I'm such a literary geek.

in French, Vladimir Putin's name is spelled and pronounced like a very popular junk food. comedians love Putin ^__^

That's because if you spelled it Putin and pronounced as one would in French, it would mean something completely different . . . (or maybe that's what you were getting at anyway).

I once was watching a television reporter interview Israelis and Palestinians about the situation current in the area at the time. As one man spoke into the microphone, the segment title "Shared Pain" was displayed at the bottom. I thought to myself, "What a weird name." Yeah, I was immersed in Arabic at the time.

Heinrich Heine complained that in France he was a nothing.

That made me think it would be fun to write a detective story where the English protagonist "Harry Covert" would be sent to France where his name would be taken to be "string bean"

Bozhemoi!