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10 funny translation mistakes made by famous brands

Slogans and advertising texts are often a headache for translators working in the field. It is enough to confuse a letter or not take into account the slang of each country or region to commit a memorable slip. The fact is that we all make mistakes, and not even internationally known brands, which spend a lot of money on translation services, are exempt from this. And there are many misconceptions of this kind that become unforgettable.

A well-known case in the automobile world is that of Mitsubishi, which has given up using the Pajero name in Spanish-speaking countries, since over there, that word has a not very positive connotation. Therefore, the vehicle was launched under the name of Montero.

We, from incredible.club, we consulted dictionaries of several languages ​​to analyze some of the advertisements that were most lost during translation. It’s one funnier than the other. Check out!

1. Nissan Booger?

Sales of Nissan’s most economical model did not start well in Spanish-speaking countries. That’s because the car is called Moco, which for our “brothers” means something like mucus, or “snot”.

2. Hunt-Wesson

The American company Hunt-Wesson entered the Canadian market with a type of ready-made bean called Gros Jos. Unfortunately, the brand did not take into account that, in the French-speaking part of the country, big jos means “big breasts”.

3. IKEA

4. Barf

Home goods company Paxam, from Iran, decided to explore the English-speaking market, and will certainly not forget what happened because of it. The soap powder called “Snow” in the Persian language, when translated into Latin characters ended up becoming barf, “vomit” in English. No wonder the product did not sell as the company had hoped.

5. Schweppes

The Schweppes brand faced a problem in Italy. All over the world, cans and bottles of the drink bear the inscription “tonic water”, or “tonic water”. However, this expression in Italian means “water from the vase”. .

6. The Jolly Green Giant

The English brand The Jolly Green Giant (“Jolly Green Giant”) had to deal with a failure in the Arab countries. The desire to translate the company name literally was a bad idea. Instead of the “happy giant”, they put a frightening “green cannibal” on the market.

7. Mercedes-Benz

Even the respected Mercedes-Benz makes translation mistakes. The company tried to translate the name of a car so that it sounded the same in German and Mandarin, but got confused in the characters. With that, the car hit the market with the name Ben Si, which literally means “the wish to die quickly”.

The company soon resolved everything by changing “Si” for “Chi”, and obtained a much better result, as the expression means “unbridled speed”.

8. Nike

Foreign characters made another “victim” among multinational brands: Nike. On the eve of the Chinese New Year, the company released a limited edition sneaker with its inscriptions: “luck” and “prosperity”. However, the combination of characters sounds like a desire to gain weight.

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Nike considered defending itself, claiming that the two inscriptions never “come together” on the same pair of shoes. One wishes luck, the other prosperity. To want someone to “get fat” would require buying two pairs of sneakers.

9. Coke

The Coca-Cola company failed to combine an English slogan with the language of New Zealand’s native population, the Maori. The mixture should say “Hello, friend”: kia ora, which means “Hello”, and Herb tea, “friend” in English. However, the translators ignored the fact that the word Herb tea, in Maori it means “death”. Thus, the slogan became “Hello, death”.

And netizens did not forgive, since the large amount of sugar present in the drink really can make the salute to death something very timely.

10. Apple

In Japanese, the name of the personal assistant for Apple devices, Siri, is pronounced “Shiri”, which sounds like the term used in the country for the word “donkey”.

Bonus: Benjamin Netanyahu, Twitter, and Machine Translation

This case shows us that we shouldn’t trust automatic translators so much. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used Twitter to congratulate singer Netta, also Israeli, who won the Eurovision Song Contest. But what could have gone wrong?

Microsoft’s Bing machine translator probably made a mistake when interpreting the Hebrew language: instead of something like “Netta, you are a real sweetheart”, the politician’s tweet said “Netta, you are a real bitch”, as shown The Times of Israel newspaper. A few hours later, Microsoft’s own service corrected the sentence.

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