Famous Errors in Commercial Translation

Last week, I read 2 articles in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and one more in the BBC about how languages caused headaches to some organizations and personalities. I leave the links for those interested to read the full stories.

In the first article, Heinz, a major food processing company released a new product called “Mayochup”, a combination of Mayonnaise and Ketchup. Click here to read the article. . Everything looked fine, except for those who can speak Cree, the most popular indigenous language in Canada. According to this article, the word “Mayochup in Cree means: “Shit-face”.

In the second article, the protagonist was LCBO. For those who live outside Ontario, LCBO (Liquor Control Board of Ontario) it’s a crown corporation that distributes and retails alcoholic beverages alongside this Canadian province. Its nature mandates that this corporation must use English and French. Things went bad when recently, a poster advertising weekly promotions, in English wrote: “Bring It Home This Week”. But the part in French said. “French Bring it Home Cette Semaine”. The mistake was spotted by customers who twitted pictures of this poster. After the organization was aware of the error and after countless people made fun out of it, they corrected the poster. Finally, you could read: “Pour Vous Cette Semaine”. Read the full article here.   

The article in the BBC was about famous mistakes made by US politicians trying to use Spanish in their campaigns in this country.  I might make further comments in future articles.  

Translation errors are common in international commerce. But they can also be costly. A professional translator must not only know the target language but needs to understand the context to make the content understandable to the target audience.

The topic of translation errors can be funny. I like to read about them in different languages to have a better understanding of the facts. Here are selections of some other famous mistakes:

1.- In an Italian Magazine, I read about an advertisement commercial launched by Schweppes, reaching the Italian market. The phrase “Schweppes, Tonic Water” was translated as “Schweppes, Acqua del Water”; in Italian “Acqua del water” means: “Toilette water”. Not really a successful campaign.

2.-  In a website about unknown facts, I read this story about Parker pen. When expanding, they had to translate their slogan: “It won’t leak in your pocket and embarrass you”; the word “embarrass” can be translated in different romance languages using a similar word. Examples: “embaraçar” (Portuguese); “embarrasser” (French); “imbarazzare” (Italian);  The problem is when you try to translate it into Spanish using this same word “embarazar”, that in English actually means “To get pregnant”. The message for Spanish speakers was: “It won’t leak your pocket and make you pregnant”. Btw, while I was writing this article, I made some tests with a machine translation and it gave me the same results for “Embarazar” in Spanish and “Embarrass” in English. My recommendation: Be careful with machine translations.

3.- In Business news daily, I read a story from former US airline Braniff, When it started to promote its new leather seats, they used the slogan “Fly in Leather”. But when they wanted to expand south of the border, they translated this slogan into Spanish and it said “Vuela en Cuero”.  The problem is that this phrase has a different connotation in some Spanish speaking countries, where the message was understood as “fly naked”. Localization was not a trend in those times.

4.- in a Belgian site in French, I read this story: The Spanish clothing design company Mango, tried to sell some jewelry in France. There is a kind of bracelet known in Spanish as “Esclava”. The name was translated as “Esclave” (in English: Slave) for the French market. This word was not really liked by the French public. There were even some calls to boycott all the company’s products. Mango had to apologize and translate this term again into French. The new chosen word was: “Gourmette”, which means “Chain bracelet”.           

5.- in Asian Times, in an article about how different countries translate terms from English, they gave the curious example of Mercedes-Benz and its starting into the Chinese market. The first challenge that companies face when getting into this market is how to translate its brand name into a language with no alphabet. The first impulse is to try to use characters with sounds that resemble the original one. To translate the name Benz, they used 2 characters: 奔死. In pinyin, it reads as “Bēn sĭ”. The first character means “to run”. The problem is that the second character means “to die”. The negative impact over the audience could not be described. But it is not only the unfortunate translation that we can get from the chosen name. Mercedes-Benz or the translator hired, should know that in Chinese culture, the negative impact of the word “die” is such that people very often avoid using words that sound like it. Even number four, “Sì” is often avoided. Number fourteen is considered as very unlucky, because it sounds in pinyin, “shí sì” is like hearing a fatal sentence in Mandarin. The solution for Mercedes-Benz was far from using a character that resembles the way it sounds. The solution they found was to use the characters:   奔驰 that in pinyin reads “Bēn chí”. But the best part is the translation of the new term: “Run Quickly”.