Watch Your Mouth!

 

Have you ever had one of those moments where you mean to say one thing but it comes out sounding completely different? Earlier this evening I had one of those moments. My friend and I were having a conversation downstairs in the living room of our house about a Human Sexuality class he was taking this quarter at Otterbein. (One of the class requirements was that each student ask his or her parent(s) about a sexual topic they never would have discussed with them as a teenager but were comfortable discussing now. My friend had no desire to do so. I remember last year taking the sex class and having the very same conversation with my dad. I won’t go into the details of the conversation. But let me just say, it was very “enlightning.”) 

While sitting at the computer, my friend pulls up a slide show from the Human Sexuality class displaying a diagram of the male anatomy. He and I proceed to make a couple off-colored jokes about the drawings, much to the chagrin of the other people in the room. Then he seamlessly transitions from looking at pictures diagraming the male anatomy, to pictures of he and his ex-girlfriend on Facebook. Mind you, I am one of the few people in the room that can see the computer screen at this point. After pulling up a couple of pictures from a date he and his girlfriend went on a couple of years back, he looks over to me and exclaims, “These are some pictures she and I took together two years ago when we were still together.” It was a completely innocent statement to me- the only person able to see the computer screen. The pictures were cute. They both were fully clothed, laughing, and sitting outside in the grass. The other six people in the room still thought we were talking about sex and the male anatomy. I peer across the room only to see one young lady from our group horrified. “You what?” she cried. “What did you do? Are we still talking about the same thing?” We both laugh. Then quickly explain what happened. For that one moment, however, it was great to see our friends reactions as their opinions of my friend crumbled to the ground.

 Later that evening, while reading my marketing textbook, I stumbled upon a section titled “Real Marketing: Watch Your Language.” The article was devoted to listing the many marketing blunders companies had made as they attempted to transition from their domestic market to other foreign markets. I couldn’t help but laugh outloud at some of these ridiculous gaffes so I am going to share some of them with you right now. I hope you get a good laugh.

-) When Coca-Cola first marketed Coke in China in the 1920’s, it developed a group of Chinese characters that, when pronounced, sounded like the product name. Unfortunately, the characters actually translated as “bite the wax tadpole.” Now, the characters on Chinese Coke bottles translate as “happiness in the mouth.”

-) Chevy’s Nova translated into Spanish as no va- “it doesn’t go.”

-) IKEA marketed a children’s workbench in America named FARTFULL (the word means “speedy” in Swedish)- it soon discontinued the product.

-) Other product names you won’t likey see in your local Speedway: Krapp toilet paper (Denmark), Crapsy Fruit cereal (France), Poo curry poweder (Argentina), and (excuse the language) Pschitt Lemonade (France).

Advertising themes often lose-or gain- something in the translation. The Coors beer slogan “get loose with Coors” in Spanish came out as “get the runs with Coors.” Other exmaples of this include:

-) Coca Cola’s “Coke adds life” theme in Japanese translated into “Coke brings your ancestors back from the dead.” (HAHA)

-) The milk industry learned too late that its American advertising question “Got Milk?” translated in Mexico as a more provocative “Are you lactating?”

-) In Chinese, the KFC slogan “finger-lickin’ good” came out as “eat your fingers off.”

-) And Frank Perdue’s classic line, “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken,” took on added meaning in Spanish: “It takes an aroused man to make a chicken affectionate.”

 That’s all for this week.