Misinterpretations in Business Marketing

Two staple anecdotes in the folklore of businesses making translation mistakes in marketing their products in foreign countries are the Coke and Pepsi company campaigns in China. Although each has been written as a factual case, the details involved seem to be only half truths in the case of Coca~Cola and unsubstantiated rumor in the case of Pepsi.

The main thrust of the Coca~Cola campaign circled around the name itself and how it was translated into Chinese. Most tellers of the tale, tell of the company itself making the blunder, when in reality it was individual, well meaning shopkeepers who made the error in their own language! When Coke first began entering the Chinese market, there were difficulties in translating the name “Coca~Cola” into the local languages. Since the Chinese people do not have an alphabet like most Western languages do, they have to rely on the characters that already exist in their language to convey a message. It was simple enough to say the name, but for advertising signs it was necessary to attempt to translate the name into characters that would, when read aloud, be the phonetic equivalent to “ko-ka-ko-la”. Since there happen to be about 200 different Chinese characters that can produce those sounds, it was also difficult to choose four that, when said together, didn’t become a phrase that made little or no sense. Before the company had the chance to come up with the best phrase for that purpose, the locals had already begun stringing characters together to put on their signs…with unfortunate results.

Shopkeepers had begun displaying signs that, when read aloud, sounded like “ko-ka-ko-la” but when read with the character’s original meaning actually read as “bite the wax tadpole” and other unfortunate phrases like "female horse fastened with wax," and "wax-flattened mare,"! Naturally, this must have caused quite a bit of confusion for anyone passing a shop advertising such a thing. Within a few months, however, Coke had begun their actual marketing campaign and had, through the use of knowledgeable translators, successfully turned the phonetic phrase to read “to let your mouth be happy” or “make your mouth rejoice” depending on the literal translation.

The PepsiCo story has a slightly different twist. Rather than the name of the product being the culprit for confusion, it was the slogan used in the ad campaign in the mid 60s that caused a stir. It bares repeating, though, that this particular claim has not been substantiated. It has proven to be elusive in its origins and there doesn’t seem to be any real evidence that this actually occurred and whether or not, if it did occur, it was China and the Chinese language that was the problem. Either way, it is still a good lesson in marketing.

The basics of the tale are that, when Pepsi introduced its new ad campaign, touting that (and I paraphrase slightly) for “those who like to live…Pepsi helps ‘em come alive!” As you may be able to see, even in its original English language, this phrase could be misinterpreted as “for those who are not alive, Pepsi can raise the dead”…and, reportedly, this is how it was translated! Several versions of the supposed translation are: "Come alive out of the grave with Pepsi”, “Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead” and “Bring dead ancestors back from heaven”. Supposedly sales of Pepsi took a sharp nosedive when this occurred, but as I said earlier, this event has never been proven. Interesting to note, though, is that Pepsico has never denied the claim.

Another good, though not true, case of language blunder is the fictional rumor about GM marketing the Chevy Nova in South America. The rumor blamed GM for not realizing that the separated sylables, "no" and "va" translated in Spanish to "not" and "go" or "doesn't go". Who'd buy a car that doesn't go? There are many different reasons why this story doesn't work and I won't go into them here, but suffice it to say that it's still an interesting example of what could happen if a translator is not careful.