Spiderman Oneshots

Multilingual

Translations are in the comments

Peter had been the friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man for over a year now. It was a tough job, and not always because of the fights. Usually his battles were a lot lower-level than what the Avengers dealt with, but Spidey had to be there for the people too. He'd run into his biggest challenge within a few months of being a superhero.

Was it a supervillain? A rival vigilante? A cunning plot to reveal his identity? No. It was the language barrier.

Peter wouldn't consider himself a language nerd, but he knew more than the average New Yorker. He spoke English fluently, obviously, knew a fair amount of Italian courtesy of Aunt May and the bare minimum of high school Spanish.

That only covered about 85% of people in the city (assuming Spanish was a language he could communicate in), and for a hero that just wasn't enough. He'd had more than a few scenarios where he'd saved somebody but been unable to comfort them or ask what had happened because their English was disjointed and their mother tongue was Korean or Yiddish or Tagalog.

So what did Peter do? He started learning languages, of course. He threw himself into his Spanish lessons, seeing as that was the second most-spoken language of the city. He started trying to hold conversations with May in Italian. He signed up for various courses and chatted with native speakers online until something sort of... clicked. Once he understood Spanish and Italian, French and German followed naturally enough.

Of course, he couldn't claim to be fluent in any of the languages: he learned enough to get by on the streets, then moved on to the next language. But it was pretty helpful, and almost never failed to lift the mood of somebody who needed his help and wasn't expecting to hear their own language.

"Walang problema, umuwi ka ng ligtas!" Spider-Man smiled and waved at a Filipino lady whose cat he'd just rescued. She thanked him one last time, then he was shooting a web and flying through the air towards the sound of shouting a few streets over.

"Thief! You think you can just take my wallet and-"

"Hey, hey! What's going on here?" Peter landed between two men. One was yelling in English, the other in increasingly frustrated Hindi.

"This man took my wallet!" He pointed at the other man, who was indeed holding a wallet, but shaking his head quickly, looking stressed and scared.

"Okay, um..." Peter didn't know much Hindi, but he did his best to form a sentence. "क्या आपने वह लिया था?"

Both men looked taken aback for a moment, then relief spread across the face of the man holding the wallet. "नहीं, इस आदमी ने इसे गिरा दिया और मैं इसे वापस करने की कोशिश कर रहा था लेकिन मैं बहुत कम अंग्रेजी बोलता हूँ।" Peter didn't understand every word but was able to make out the basics.

"Sir, I think you dropped your wallet. This man says he was just trying to return it."

The first man blinked. "O-oh. Sorry." He took the wallet and hastily walked away, embarrassed. The other man sighed, brushing off his hands.

"Thank you," he said in stilted English, with a small nod, before going on his own way. Satisfied that he'd done a good job, Peter was about to swing away when he heard someone calling him.

"Spider-Man!" A young girl was waving at him from across the road. He jogged over. "Is het waar dat jij alle talen spreekt?" She asked him in Dutch.

"Niet alle talen, maar ik weet er een paar. Waarom?" He replied. She grinned.