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/Creeper
Got any good ones to add?
Top 13 Worst & Funny Marketing Slogan Translations Ever
1. When Parker Pen marketed a ball-point pen in Mexico, its ads were supposed to have read, “It won’t leak in your pocket and embarrass you.” The company thought that the word “embarazar” (to impregnate) meant to embarrass, so the ad read: “It won’t leak in your pocket and make you pregnant.”
2. Scandinavian vacuum manufacturer Electrolux used the following in an American campaign: “Nothing Sucks like an Electrolux.”
3. Clairol introduced the “Mist Stick,” a curling iron, into Germany only to find out that “mist” is slang for manure. Not too many people had use for the “Manure Stick.”
4. Coors put its slogan, “Turn It Loose,” into Spanish, where it was read as “Suffer From Diarrhea.”
5. Pepsi’s “Come Alive With the Pepsi Generation” translated into “Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back From the Grave” in Chinese.
6. When Gerber started selling baby food in Africa, they used the same packaging as in the US, with the smiling baby on the label. Later they learned that in Africa, companies routinely put pictures on the labels of what’s inside, since many people can’t read.
7. Colgate introduced a toothpaste in France called Cue, the name of a notorious porno magazine
8. Frank Perdue’s chicken slogan, “It takes a strong man to make a tender chicken,” was translated into Spanish as “it takes an aroused man to make a chicken affectionate.”
9. When American Airlines wanted to advertise its new leather first class seats in the Mexican market, it translated its “Fly In Leather” campaign literally, which meant “Fly Naked” (vuela en cuero) in Spanish.
10. An American T-shirt maker in Miami printed shirts for the Spanish market which promoted the Pope’s visit. Instead of “I saw the Pope” (el Papa), the shirts read “I Saw the Potato” (la papa).
11. The Dairy Association’s huge success with the campaign “Got Milk?” prompted them to expand advertising to Mexico. It was soon brought to their attention the Spanish translation read “Are You Lactating?”
12.General Motors had a very famous fiasco in trying to market the Nova car in Central and South America. “No va” in Spanish means, “It Doesn’t Go”.
13. The Coca-Cola name in China was first read as “Kekoukela”, meaning “Bite the Wax Tadpole” or “Female Horse Stuffed with Wax”, depending on the dialect. Coke then researched 40,000 characters to find a phonetic equivalent “kokoukole”, translating into “Happiness in the Mouth.”
http://www.shaanhaider.com/2010/08/top-13-worst-funny-marketing-slogan.html
/Creeper
That's why it's best to hire native speakers of the target language as translators imho, especially in advertisement translation/localization. Even if the verbal translation is OK, most times translation doesn't deliver the full cultural connotation that readers of the source language would perceive from the source text. Therefore, rewriting is the best method of translation. Hans Vermeer and many other scholars of the "Skopos Theory" explained this method in great details.
Translation is an imperfect art, and the only thing that you can truly and fully translate is the expected function, or in other words, the "Skopos" of the text. For example, the primary function of advertisement is to persuade your target customers to buy your products, and it should be considered good translation as long as this primary function is fulfilled. It doesn't matter how much you change the form of the source text, and it'd be a stupid idea to prioritize the form of text above the function of it. The source text writer knows little about the target language or target culture, actually it's impossible for the original writer to have translation in mind because there're like thousands of languages in the world, and no way could the writer know how to make his product easier to be translated into an unspecified language.
"Rob Diaz" in Mexico actually means "one who sucks off truck drivers for a nickel a fleet"
That Coors Light one is bull .
Turn it loose in spanish doesn't translate into that.
Might as well also mean that a pregnant is giving birth.
In French, Avante translates to "Bring me your underage trannys"
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