COLUMN What About Bob?

Author: Bob Wainwright

I was sitting down, obeying my thirst with a nice refreshing Sprite yesterday, when I began to wonder if advertisements actually hold power over consumers. The only example I could think of was when I drank a gallon of Gatorade and then ran 10 miles in order to see if my sweat would come out green. But I might have done that had I not seen the commercials, too.
So I began to wonder about companies marketing overseas instead. Do company slogans remain the same in foreign countries, and if so, couldn't that be problematic? Well, I searched the Internet and discovered that indeed it is.
For instance, when Pepsi translated its new slogan, "Come alive with the Pepsi Generation," into Chinese, sales dropped dramatically.
That is, until it realized that the new translation basically meant "Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead." The same thing happened to KFC as well. Only its slogan, "finger-lickin' good," came out as "eat your fingers off."
Meanwhile, General Motors expected big things when it introduced its new model, the Chevy Nova, in South America. Apparently, however, nobody in the company spoke Spanish, because it was not until zero cars were sold in the first month that GM realized "no va" translates as "it won't go."
Ford had a similar problem on its hands when their model, the Pinto, flopped in Brazil. The motor company then discovered that "pinto" is Brazilian slang for "tiny male genitals." The mistake left Ford execs wondering which was worse: Firestone tires that slip, or a Freudian slip.
Moving into Mexico, when Parker Pen began marketing their new ballpoint, ads stated, "It won't leak in your pocket and embarrass you." Unfortunately, the ad agency was positive that the Spanish word "embarazar" meant embarrass.
Well, it doesn't. And consequently, all of Parker Pen's Mexican billboards read, "It won't leak in your pocket and make you pregnant."
Even the king of advertising himself, Frank Perdue, fell victim to a brutal translation of a slogan. The line, "It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken," helped make Perdue famous in America. But in Mexico, the slogan was terribly mangled, so that billboards all over the country showed a photo of Perdue with a chicken under the caption, "It takes a hard man to make a chicken aroused."
So for all the foolhardy Americans out there, please be careful when translating. And thanks for reading, "Que Sobre Bob?"