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The world is smaller. The internet has done that. But language still poses many barriers. What I say and what you hear may not always be the same. Don't believe me? Buy a product made overseas and read the English translation of the instructions. Need more examples? These marketing failures may help to illustrate . . . 1. Coors put its slogan, "Turn it loose", into Spanish, where it was read as "Suffer from diarrhea". 2. Scandinavian vacuum manufacturer Electrolux used the following in an American campaign: "Nothing sucks like an Electrolux." 3. Clairol introduced the "Mist Stick", a curling iron, into German only to find out that "mist" is slang for manure. Not too many people had use for the "manure stick". 4. When Gerber started selling baby food in Africa, they used the same packaging as in the U.S., with the beautiful Caucasian baby on the label. Later they learned that in Africa, companies routinely put pictures on the label of what's inside, since most people can't read. 5. Colgate introduced a toothpaste in France called Cue, the name of a notorious porno magazine. 6. An American T-shirt maker in Miami printed shirts for the Spanish market which promoted the Pope's visit. Instead of "I saw the Pope" (el Papa), the shirts read "I saw the potato" (la papa). 7. Pepsi's "Come alive with the Pepsi Generation" translated into "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave", in Chinese. 8. Frank Perdue's chicken slogan, "it takes a strong man to make a tender chicken" was translated into Spanish as "it takes an aroused man to make a chicken affectionate". 9. The Coca-Cola name in China was first read as "Ke-kou-ke-la", meaning "Bite the wax tadpole" or "female horse stuffed with wax", depending on the dialect. Coke then researched 40,000 characters to find a phonetic equivalent "ko-kou-ko-le", translating into "happiness in the mouth". 10. When Parker Pen marketed a ball-point pen in Mexico, its ads were supposed to have read, "It won't leak in your pocket and embarrass you." Instead, the company thought that the word "embarazar" (to impregnate) meant to embarrass, so the ad read: "It won't leak in your pocket and make you pregnant."
Feel free to link to this page. Please see my linking tips. If you reference or circulate this material, I appreciate a reference both to the site name (James S. Huggins' Refrigerator Door) and to the URL of this page so that others may see this notice about my use of this material. I didn't write all the stuff on this page. I got it, in part, from email and/or newsgroup postings. Efforts to identify a copyright holder were unsuccessful and it may be anonymous or in the public domain. If you have any information to the contrary, and particularly if you are the original author or copyright holder, please notify me. To send me notices about this information, please see my DMCA page and also my Disclaimers, Copyrights & Other Legal Stuff page. This site seeks use permission from copyright holders and will not post if permission is denied. Whenever ownership information is obtained, I promptly correct the page. (For example, see this page.) I edited, adapted and supplemented this particular version: Copyright © 1997-2008, James S. Huggins. |
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