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From Wikipedia:
LIKE APPLES AND ORANGES
The idiom is not unique. In
Quebec French it may take the form "comparer des pommes avec des oranges" while in european French the idiom hesitates between "additionner des carottes et..." something else which can be "des pommes de terre", "des navets" or "des choux". In
Latin American Spanish usually is "comparar papas y boniatos" or "comparar peras con manzanas." In some other languages the term for "orange" derives from "apple", suggesting not only that a direct comparison between the two is possible, but that it is implicitly present in their names. Fruit other than apples and oranges can also be compared; for example, apples and
pears are compared in
Danish,
Dutch,
German,
Spanish,
Swedish,
Czech,
Romanian,
Slovene,
Luxembourgish and
Turkish. However, apples are actually more closely related to pears — both are
rosaceae — than to oranges. In fact, in the Spanish-speaking world, a common idiom is
sumar peras con manzanas - that is, "to add pears and apples". The same thing applies in Romanian where a popular idiom is
a aduna merele cu perele - that is again, "to add apples and pears".
Some languages use completely different items, such as Serbian "Поредити бабе и жабе" (comparing grandmothers and toads) or Romanian "baba şi mitraliera" (the grandmother and the machine gun) or "vaca şi izmenele" (the cow and the longjohns) or "tiganul si carioca"(the gypsy and the marker), while some languages compare dissimilar properties of dissimilar items. For example, the equivalent Danish idiom, "Hvad er højest, Rundetårn eller et tordenskrald?" translates word-by-word as "What is highest, the Round Tower or the volume of a thunderclap?" In British English, the phrase chalk and cheese means the same thing as apples and oranges. In Argentina, a common question is "En qué se parecen el amor y el ojo del hacha?" which translates into "What do love and axe eye have in common?" and emphasizes dissimilarity between two subjects; in Colombia, a similar (though more rude) version is common: "confundir la mierda con la pomada" - literally, to confuse shit with ointment.
A number of more exaggerated comparisons are sometimes made, in cases in which the speaker believes the two objects being compared are radically different beyond reproach. For example "oranges to orangutans" "apples to dishwashers" and so on. In English, different fruits, such as pears, plums, or lemons are sometimes substituted with "oranges" in this context.