Most globally renowned brands run their own advertising campaigns in many countries. The problem is that what sounds good in one language can sound completely different in another. Many slogans that work perfectly in their native language sound quite ridiculous when translated literally into other languages. And because of this, numerous silly yet funny mishaps occur.
Advertising managers who didn’t take their work seriously often skimped on hiring truly competent translators, resulting in advertising campaigns failing miserably. AdmiGram.com urges advertisers never to cut corners on staff — and this list shows exactly where that kind of cost-cutting can lead. It’s impossible to read these without laughing — and cringing.
Lost in Translation: Funny Advertising or Brand Errors
The German company F&K Waterhouse never imagined that naming its bottled water “Blue Water” would make it a legend in global branding. When it entered the markets of Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet countries, where Slavic languages predominate, F&K Waterhouse caused wild laughter and bewilderment: its advertising slogan, translated literally, came out as “Vomit is the purest water.”
The Swedish company Electrolux, with great fanfare, decided to enter the US market, offering its latest vacuum cleaners. It couldn’t have imagined that its slogan about perfect cleaning would sound in English as “Nothing sucks like an Electrolux.”
Things looked just as funny when Coca-Cola set out to conquer China. The world-famous slogan about how pleasant it is to drink Coca-Cola literally translated to “bite the wax tadpole” in Chinese.
But it was even worse for Pepsi. Stunned and unsettled Chinese consumers demanded a ban on the sale of the blue cans, whose slogan literally told them to “drink Pepsi, and your deceased ancestors will rise again.”
KFC also suffered from a poor translation when entering the Chinese market. Chinese consumers were genuinely shocked when a strange old man stared out at them from the advertising poster, apparently threatening to bite their fingers off.
Ford ran into an equally funny problem when it introduced its Pinto model in Brazil. Brazilian men burst into fits of laughter, because in Portuguese slang, “pinto” means “tiny male genitalia.”
Ford’s next blunder was the Fiera model in Spain, whose name literally translated to “old hag.” And the Ford Caliente in Mexico didn’t fare much better — in slang, the name evoked a “woman of loose morals.”
Chevrolet found itself in similar trouble with its own models. In most Eastern European countries, the name of the Chevrolet Kalos was read as “car made of dung.”
And the Chevrolet Nova was a source of embarrassment in Spanish-speaking markets, since “no va” in Spanish literally means “it doesn’t go.”
The famous Mist Stick hair-curling iron was headed for complete failure in Germany, where “Mist” is a slang word for manure — real German women stared in horror at the boxes advertising “manure sticks” for their hair.
Coors beer ran into similar trouble: in South American countries, its slogan warned that anyone who drank a can would “suffer terrible diarrhea.”
And when IKEA opened its stores in Thailand, it ran into a problem of its own — its slogan literally promised that anyone who bought their furniture would be reduced to bitter tears of disappointment.
