Lost in Translation
These are posted all over the Web, but they always make my class on global marketing a little more amusing. It's sort of a "don't get on this list" warning for marketers:
- Waterpik uses another name in Denmark. "Pik" is the common Danish word for male genitals. Most Danes can easily translate "water" to the danish word "vand". And "vandpik" is a term for the morning erection.
- IKEA tried to sell a workbench in the U.S. called the FARTFULL.
- In the late '70s, the American computer company Wang was puzzled why its British branch refused to use its latest motto "Wang Cares".
- Traficante is an Italian brand of mineral water. In Spanish, it means drug dealer.
- 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".
- Coors put its slogan, "Turn it loose" into Spanish, where it was read as "Suffer from diarrhea.”
- Chicken-man Frank Perdue's slogan, "It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken," got terribly mangled in another Spanish translation. Perdue had billboards all over Mexico with a caption that translated to, "It takes a hard man to make a chicken aroused."
