More Funny Translations
Oh yes, there’s more; we did not exhaust the world’s supply of daft translations last time. We barely even scratched the surface. Here’s another selection, this time focusing more on localisation and what can go wrong when a company thinks up a shiny new brand name and doesn’t check what it means with the locals.
As ever, brand names can go astray. The apocryphal story about the Chevy Nova (that it didn’t sell well in Spanish-speaking countries on account of “no va” being Spanish for “doesn’t go”) is just that – apocryphal. It didn’t actually happen. Neither did the Ford Pinto sell badly in Brazil, on account of “pinto” being Portuguese for “a man with a small…”, erm, never mind; because the Ford Pinto was never actually sold in Brazil at any point. (This was not necessarily a bad thing for Brazilians – the petrol tank in the Pinto had a nasty habit of exploding.) Bad brand names and slogans do, however, slip through the net.
French telephone company Orange thought their new slogan “The future’s bright, the future’s Orange” would drive sales in the British market. Whether this was achieved on the mainland is unclear, but it did the exact opposite in Northern Ireland. In that part of the world, green is associated with Catholicism, and orange is associated with the Protestant Orange Order. Vodafone and BT Cellnet weren’t too unhappy that Orange went for that slogan, though…
Then there’s the Italian mineral water brand “Traficante”. This sounds all Mediterranean and healthy, conjuring up pictures in the head of La Dolce Vita. It may well have done so in many countries, but not in Spain. In Spanish the word “Traficante” means “(hard) drugs dealer”.
Another unfortunate company was a Japanese tourist agency which decided it was high time to branch out into the English-speaking market. They no doubt had visions of starting to join the big guns by getting lots of high-spending Americans in. Unfortunately, most of their customers had decidedly, well, weird requests for what sort of holidays they were looking for. The company finally discovered that being called the “Kinki Nippon Tourist Agency” was always, always going to lead to this sort of problem.
Finally, when Electrolux decided to enter the American market, it spent quite some time and money thinking up a catchy slogan. And still they managed to come up with “Nothing sucks like an Electrolux”.
No, nothing sucks quite like not using the professionals who can stop embarrassing linguistic fiascos. And, as ever, here at Wolfestone, we’ll be happy to help you make sure that your customers are looking at your product, not laughing at your ineptitude.