“…no matter how assiduous you are, you can’t turn a bad translation into a good one: You can only make it less bad.” – Robert Gottlieb

Lawrence Creaghan

Classic translation bloopers

Bad translation generally results in less-effective communications, damage to corporate image, and missed opportunities...but sometimes the results are so spectacularly off the mark they go viral and take on a life of their own.

• When Braniff Airlines translated a slogan touting its upholstery, “Fly in leather,” it came out in Spanish as “Fly naked.”
• Coors put its slogan, “Turn it loose,” into Spanish, where it was read as “Suffer from diarrhea.”
• Chicken magnate Frank Perdue’s line, “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken,” sounds much more interesting in Spanish: “It takes a sexually stimulated man to make a chicken affectionate.”
• When Vicks first introduced its cough drops on the German market, they were chagrined to learn that the German pronunciation of “v” is “f,” which makes Vicks in German the phonetic equivalent of “sexual penetration.”
• Not to be outdone, Puffs tissues tried later to introduce its product, only to learn that “Puff” in German is a colloquial term for a whorehouse.
• The Chevy Nova never sold well in Spanish-speaking countries. “No va” means “doesn’t go” in Spanish.
• When Pepsi started marketing its products in China a few years back, they translated their slogan, “Come alive, you’re in the Pepsi generation” pretty literally. The slogan in Chinese really meant, “Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back from the Grave.”
• When Coca-Cola first shipped to China, they named the product something that when pronounced sounded like “Coca-Cola.” The only problem was that the characters used meant, “Bite the wax tadpole.” They later changed it to a set of characters that meant “Happiness in the mouth.”
• Clairol introduced the “Mist Stick” curling iron into Germany only to find out that mist is slang for manure. Not too many people had use for the manure stick.

Adaptation Versus Translation