 rocker says: Hilarious Translations! To be honest I don't believe most of these... but good find, though! The pepsi one cracked me up. Some of these were circulating when I was studying for my Linguistics major 30 years ago. Such things are unlikely to happen, since all overseas advertising is channeled through local ad agencies, and they all have people who can catch these things. I tend to think some of these are urban myths myth or not, these were funny  I suspended my skepticism for a good laugh. LOL Re: 1) That's true, Coke in Chinese translates to "Happiness in the Mouth," however any can I've ever seen has the characters 可口可乐, which written in pinyin are "kekoukele". Note only is this article incorrect, but I also doubt its second statement; since the majority of people in China are barely literate enough to read the newspaper (requiring between 3-5k words) how could you think they searched 40k? The characters they did in fact use are quite common actually. When companies do business in China, not only do they have problems with translations, but there are cultural factors as well. Certain words are avoided, bot because they are bad in themselves, but because they are homophonic or have other associations with words that are "taboo" for one reason or another. If you go to an oriental market (like a city's "Chinatown" or "Little Saigon", you can see imported canned goods with brand names like "Happy Luck Joy Bean Sprouts" (a spurious, but typical, example). In the Orient, people equate a closer bond between the name of the product and its effiacy. I think scotfrank knows what I'm getting at. Pepsi makes me feel 'REVIVED' The Rolls Royce 'Silver Cloud' was originally called 'Silver Mist'. In German, mist means poo. That is true. Maybe on THIS end most mistakes in translations are caught, but, fortunately that's not always the case on the other side of the Pacific. I've laughed myself to tears over some of the translations of instructions for products made in China. And who could forget the Japanese "tootle him melodiously?"  That's what happens when people on both sides don't check the translations. The problems arise when the text isn't checked by native speakers on both ends. I once worked for a US branch of a Japanese software company. A fax came in from Japan noting changes in the format for the "report of the type of each". I spent days trying to figure this out, then requested the code string. It turned out to be for the "individual item report". Evidently the sender's Japanese-English dictionary listed "each" as a possible translation for the Japanese word for "individual". I recently got a bit of spam from overseas (India, I think) which the sender adressed to "...all my expensive friends". Of ... Gerber was selling children in Africa!! :o |
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