When Pepsi first launched its campaign in China, the translation of their slogan “Pepsi Brings you Back to Life” was slightly more literal than the company intended. They settled on ‘The world’s private bank.’īut the winner of the slogan-translation-gone-wrong category is the victim of a misinterpreted metaphor: Pepsi. The bank had to spend around $10 million to correct the mistake and come up with a new slogan. Their slogan stateside was ‘Assume nothing.’ Too bad the resulting translation was interpreted as ‘Do nothing’. HSBC Bank made the classic mistake of literally translating their US campaign for overseas markets. Perhaps a more truthful slogan for HSBC Bank In Farsi, they call it ‘snow’ in their marketing campaigns, but a mistranslation had the labels reading ‘barf.’ Yeah, we think we’ll pass on that soap. One that didn’t go over so well was their laundry soap. Paxam is a company from Iran that sells a bunch of different consumer goods. With so many Spanish speakers in the world, how do these companies seem to be incapable of finding a single Spanish speaker to test their slogans on in the early stages? It ended up meaning something like ‘It takes a sexually stimulated man to make a chicken affectionate.’ Er… Parker Pen’s slogan reassuringly claimed: ‘It won’t leak in your pocket and embarrass you.’ Yet, when introducing their high-quality ball-point pens to the Mexican market the phrase read: ‘ It won’t leak in your pocket and make you pregnant.’ Why? It was a linguistic ‘false friend’: the Spanish ‘embarazar’ may sound similar to ‘embarrass’ but it really means to put one in the oven! Talk about slogan translation gone wrong…įrank Perdue could also use a Spanish lessonĬhicken company Frank Perdue came up with a clever slogan in English: ‘It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.’ Unfortunately, that didn’t go over quite so well in Spanish. Parker Pen company also suffered a tag-line fail, although for a different reason. It won’t leak in your pocket and make you pregnant The translated version of the slogan used an expression commonly interpreted as ‘Suffer from diarrhoea.’ I’m sure they got plenty of attention for that one, but not for the right reasons! When Coors introduced its cool ‘Turn It Loose’ campaign to the Spanish market, the company somewhat underestimated the importance of a proper translation. They learned the hard way that slang doesn’t translate well. The first candidate for the best catch-phrase fail is the American brewing company, Coors. So, let’s take a look at: Marketing fail: When the catch-phrase isn’t so catchy! Conquering new markets is about the right marketing, and marketing means translating ideas, not words. Translation traps are everywhere, be it a badly translated slogan, a company name or a cultural hiccup. If you’re thinking, “How hard could it be to translate a few simple words?”, we’ll let these examples do the talking…so to speak. Borders might be disappearing, but cultural and language barriers still stand strong. But sometimes this all pales in comparison to a few little mix-ups when it comes to language. They think they’re taking along plenty of hard-earned know-how from home. So many companies leap at the chance to take their business across borders with excitement… unaware of the fact that they’re about to join the infamous rank of international marketing fails.
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