6 – It won’t leak in your pocket and embarrass you,
- Parker pens apparently have an unknown edge on their competition, they won’t knock you up.
- The popular pen maker made a fundamental mistake that turned the line in their Mexican ads from “it won’t leak in your pocket and embarrass you” into “it won’t leak in your pocket and get you pregnant.”
- But hey it’s a fair concern, leaks cause unwanted pregnancies all the time. You can be safe in the knowledge that Parker’s pen is shooting blanks.
5 – Ford Pinto,
- Long before Ford tried to sell you a car containing a dead body, they insulting your penis size.
- The Pinto was named after a colour pattern found in horses…but in Brazil pinto had become slang for something else, a tiny penis.
- Considering that “small cock” has more in common with the actual car than “patterns on a horse”, maybe this wasn’t a translation fail at all.
4 – Schweppes Tonic Water,
- Who would have thought that one slight error would make your product 200% more appealing to dogs…too bad they can’t read.
- Schweppes had the bad luck to translate their famous tonic water into toilet water in Italy. Considering tonic water is such a basic thing it’s hard to understand how that even happened.
- This probably had a bigger impact on bars than anywhere else. “I’ll have a gin & toilet water thanks…wait no, that sounds gross. Hold the gin”.
3 – Brings you Back to Life!,
- Yeah in English this ad campaign is non-sense so it’s not a surprise that it failed to pass the language barrier.
- Pepsi was trying to run the slogan “Brings you back to life!” in China. But instead of hyping up Pepsi’s energising powers they told people the soda will “Bring your ancestors back from the dead!”
- You can imagine the disappointment on people’s faces as they poured cola on Grandpa Chen’s grave only to see it drain away.
2 – It Takes a Tough Man to Make a Tender Chicken,
- Nothing like some good ol’ fashioned bestiality to get people to buy your tender meat.
- Well whoever translated Perdue’s chicken adverts into Spanish certainly thinks that. Turing the line “it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken” into “It takes a virile man to make a chicken pregnant”.
- Yeeah I’m pretty sure that’s not what they wanted to say. Unless Perdue actually cracked the secret to human-avian breeding and have actually been creating a secret army of virile chicken men and this lone heroic translator is trying to warn us all! God they are gonna peck our eyes out!
1 – Finger Lick’n Good,
- Hell if the chicken men don’t get us then colonel Sanders is gonna bite your fucking fingers off.
- People in China got a rude awakening when KFC mistakenly translated “Finger Lick’n Good” into “We’ll eat your fingers off”. MmMmm Kentucky fried corpses.
- Well that’s kinda close I guess, I’d eat someone’s fingers off if they were coated in KFC Gravy.
Pages: 1 2