💾 Archived View for gemini.spam.works › mirrors › textfiles › humor › JOKES › mishap.txt captured on 2022-06-12 at 09:38:53.
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When Coca-Cola first shipped to China, they named the product something that when pronounced sounded like "Coca-Cola." The only problem was that the characters used meant "Bite the wax tadpole." They later changed to a set of characters that mean "Happiness in the mouth." When Braniff translated a slogan touting its upholstery, "Fly in leather," it came out in Spanish as "Fly naked." Coors put its sloga, "Turn it loose," into Spanish, where it was read as "Suffer from diarrhea." Chicken magnate Frank Perdue's line, "It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken," sounds much more interesting in Spanish: "It takes a sexually stimulated man to make a chicken affectionate." When Vicks first introduced it's cough drops on the german market, they were chagrined to learn that the german pronunciation of "v" is f --- which in german is the gutteral equivalent of "sexual penetration." Ford had a similar problem in Brazil when the Pinto flopped. The company found out that Pinto was Brazilian slang for "tiny male genitals". Ford pried all the nameplates off and substituted Corcel, which means horse. When Parker Pen marketed a ballpoint pen in Mexico, its ads were supposed to say "It won't leak in your pocket and embarrass you." However, the company's mistakenly thought the spanish word "embarazar" meant embarrass. Instead the ads said that "It wont leak in your pocket and make you pregnant." An American T-shirt maker in Miami printed shirts for the spanish market which promoted the Pope's visit. Instead of the desired "I Saw the Pope" in Spanish, the shirts proclaimed "I Saw the Potato." Not to be outdone, Puffs tissues tried later to introduce its product, only to learn that "Puff" in german is a colloquial term for a whorehouse. The English weren't too fond of the name either, as it's a highly derogatory term for a non-heterosexual. Chicken-man Frank Perdue's slogan, "It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken," got terribly mangled in another Spanish translation. A photo of Perdue with one of his birds appeared on billboards all over Mexico with a caption that explained "It takes a hard man to make a chicken aroused." Hunt-Wesson introduced its Big John products in French Canada as Gros Jos before finding out that the phrase, in slang, means "big breasts." In this case, however, the name problem did not have a noticeable effect on sales. The Chevy Nova never sold well in Spanish speaking countries. "No va" means "it doesn't go" in Spanish. Colgate introduced a toothpaste in France called Cue, the name of a notorious porno mag. When Gerber first started selling baby food in Africa, they used the same packaging as here in the USA - with the ute baby on the label. Later they found out that in Africa that companies routinely put pictures of the label of what's inside since more people can't read. When Pepsi started marketing its products in China a few years back, the translated their slogan, "Pepsi Brings you Back to Life" pretty literally. The slogan in Chinese really meant, "Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back from the Grave." A hair products company, Clairol, introduced the "Mist Stick", a curling iron, into Germany to find out that mist is slang for manure. Not too many people had use for the manure stick.