You could make it work by putting a "no strict 'refs';" in front of it, but you shouldn't. Don't use variables as variable references. Instead, make a hash of hashes.

my %names;
$names{fred1} = {1 => "un", 2 => "deux", 3 => "trois"};
$names{mary1} = {1 => "eins", 2 => "zwei", 3 => "drei"};
...
print $names{$n}{$m};
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