Posts Tagged ‘brand’
Some Brand Names Don’t Translate Well
Many global companies, like Coca-Cola, Nike, Google, Intel and Microsoft, choose to use the same brand name in multiple countries. This is not possible for every brand, but it can often be an advantage. Think of the degree to which a single brand name simplifies marketing and increases return on advertising investment. By comparison, how [...]
International Brand Checks Save Brand Names
International brand checks can help to prevent disastrous international blunders. The following example from the article "Prevent International Blunders" shows an example of one company that does this correctly. ...Rolls-Royce is a company that proactively works to prevent these types of blunders. Just before Rolls-Royce launched the Silver [...]
Wings Air: Fly is Cheap
Wings Air, an Indonesian airline, has a short, grammatically incorrect slogan that inspires about as much confidence as the Uzbekistan Airways' ad that read "Good Luck." Before an English editor could check the slogan, Wings Air paid to print the words "Fly is Cheap" on signs, aircraft, and airsickness bags. "Fly is cheap," huh? Well, just [...]
Body by Fisher
In his article "How to Push a Body Abroad without Making It a Corpse," in the August 10, 1964 issue of Business Abroad and Export Trade, author Edward M. Mazze told of a translation problem experienced by General Motors (GM) in Belgium. Fisher Body has been building automobile bodies for GM cars for more than 100 years. Some would say the "Body [...]
International Brand Check | A Service to Protect Your Brand Investment
An international brand check can save your brand investment. Without one, your company brand could suffer embarrassing and costly damage, and repairs may require more time and money than you can afford. This global brand checking service is something that should be done even earlier than most marketing executives realize. Most marketing and [...]
Racing Turns Racist Due to Product Translation Error
A German company learned the hard way that its PR firm lacks cultural sensitivity and professional linguistic ability. One year ago, the German "tuning shop" AVUS Performance souped up an Audi RS6 Avant and released the car with the terribly offensive name "Audi RS6 White Power." Yes, the color of the car was white. However, the non-native [...]
Baseball Bloopers Lost in Translation
In Japan As baseball season begins in the United States this weekend, we are reminded that America's favorite pastime has seen its share of translation bloopers. When former US Major Leaguer Matt Franco was playing for a Japanese team called the Chiba Lotte Marines, he attended a team meeting on nutrition. There he had an experience much like [...]
Stinky Swedish Product Names Lost without Translation
In the fifties and sixties, there was a Swedish car magazine named "Fart." "Fart" is a Swedish word meaning "speed." Although this likely caused no problem in the magazine's home country, rumors abound that this was quite embarrassing when the writers would travel to international car and racing events. Fifty years later, another Swedish [...]
Chinese Restaurant Named “Translate Server Error”
Machine translation is not appropriate for restaurant signs. In this case, someone input the Chinese name into a machine translation program, unaware that the application was not working at the moment. Without having a human check the result, they submitted it to the sign maker and posted it above their restaurant. That is why boingboing.net [...]
Pee Pee Phone Brand Does Not Pass “the Snicker Test” | Japanese Brand Localization
A few years ago, International Systems Research (ISR) released a softphone in Japan called the PPPhone (pronounced "pee pee phone"). Unfortunately, that name does not pass what some people call "the snicker test" in English and many other languages where "pee pee" is understood to mean something else. ISR had some good reasoning for using the PP [...]
