Bizarre Brand Name Blunders

International marketing can be spectacularly profitable if done right. However, language and cultural differences must be smoothed out before a product is rolled out in a different country. This doesn't always happen, and sometimes there's a magnificently embarrassing screwup that people will talk about for years. Auto companies have been particularly egregious about this. But it's not always a matter of translating English to other languages. Sometimes it goes the other way.



To be fair, a lot of these mistranslation events are fairly old, but they continue to happen in the 21st century. How hard would it be to vet these things with a few native speakers before releasing an entire marketing campaign? See all 15 stories in a pictofacts post at Cracked.