Bite the Wax Tadpole: Difference between revisions
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One often hilarious side effect of globalization is that product names and commercial [[Slogans]] do not always translate well into other languages and cultures. The problem is frequently compounded by the translator's ignorance of idioms or regional usages that a native speaker would understand and/or avoid. The result is a slogan that insults, offends, or unintentionally amuses the reader.
Note that many of the examples of this trope which can be found on the
A subtrope of [[Blind Idiot Translation]]. One result of [[Did Not Do the Bloody Research|Not Doing The Bloody Research]]. Compare with [[Gratuitous English]], [[My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels]], [[In My Language, That Sounds Like...]], [[Clean Dub Name]]. The entire point of the [[Homogenous Multinational Ad Campaign]] is to avoid this, and a [[Market-Based Title]] is another way to.
{{examples}}
== Beverages (non-alcoholic) ==
* This trope is [[Trope Namer|named for]] one of the classic examples, an attempt to transliterate "Coca-Cola" into Chinese; the right sounds were used, but the wrong ''characters'' were written, with the result that instead of advertising soft drinks, the consumption of [[Expospeak Gag|paraffin larval amphibians was encouraged]]. ([http://snopes.com/cokelore/tadpole.asp Note that this was never the official name]; rather, before there was an official Mandarin version, shopkeepers who sold Coke would use whichever transliteration they wanted). [[Dave Barry]] declared "Bite the Wax Tadpole" to be "the best name I ever heard for a soft drink." (The closest "bite the wax tadpole" could ever get to sounding like Coca-Cola would be 齰蝌蚪蜡 - cuòkēdǒulà. Close, but no cigar.)
** Coca-Cola has had other problems with Chinese. A simple dialect variation on the phrase that provides the trope name resulted in "Bite the wax-fattened mare". The eventual ''official'' transliteration ends up being a fairly close approximation (they couldn't actually transliterate it exactly and have a good name, as there's no character reading as "La" that has a meaning that sounds like anything you'd actually want to put in your
* In a related story, the slogan "Come alive! You're in the Pepsi Generation" was [http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/ancestor.asp allegedly] accidentally marketed in Taiwan as "Pepsi brings your ancestors [[Back From the Dead]]." Gets a [[Shout-Out]] in [[Mass Effect 2]], where the soft drink Tupari Sport is advertised with the slogan "Tupari: Brings your ancestors back from the grave!"
* Calpis, a popular Japanese milky soft drink was derived as a portmanteau of cal from calcium and pis from sarpis (butter flavor in Sanskrit). In English, it sounds similar to "cow piss". The product's name was changed to "Calpico" in Asian supermarkets in English speaking countries, but still retains the original katakana spelling.
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** Another version of this story had Clairol attempting to market a product called the 'Mist Stick'.
*** Even more hilarious, because it is similar to 'Miststück' ('bitch', literally 'piece of manure')!
** Surely, at least some of these companies [[Did Not Do the Research]]
* This one was mocked by Swedish comedy duo 'Anders And Måns' -- a beverage called 'Nordic Fog'. They seemed to think it would be neat to have a Danish 'Ø', tying in with the Nordic
** It was called "Nørdic ''Mist''", not "Nørdic Fog". And was a brand of mineral water.
** [[Heavy Metal Umlaut|Everything's better with Ümlauts]]. Well, almost.
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* Honda has also fallen victim to this. A new model was to be introduced under the name "Fitta", when it was discovered that the word is a crude term for female genitalia used in Norwegian and Swedish. The car was renamed to "Jazz" in certain markets and "Fit" in others.
** To add even more hilarity, the car was advertised with the slogan "It looks small on the outside, but is huge once you get in".
* There is a bus company in Germany called Fücker. Many Germans speak enough English to find this amusing. One has to wonder if any of its routes go to the Austrian village of [https://web.archive.org/web/20090201171048/http://www.fucking.at/fucking/eOrt1.htm Fucking] (linked site is probably SFW if not kid-friendly).
** Also, instead of using two dots as part of the "ü", the company Fücker uses something resembling a [http://sysadm.in/blog/images/fucker-bus.jpg monobrow], resulting in the letter "ü" actually being recognized as a "u".
** The unfortunately named 'Lamers' bus line used to show up in video game forums all the time. [http://www.golamers.com/ Go Lamers!]
** There's also a bus company called "DAU" in Germany. Not all that funny, unless you know that "DAU" is a common play on the nuclear facility term "GAU" meaning the "Biggest Imaginable Accident/Disaster". (Tchernobyl was considered a Super-GAU). "DAU" means "Dümmster anzunehmender User". Literally "Most Stupid Imaginable User", and is used by Computer and electronic savvy people as well as by the poor guys working in Help callcenters at the companies who produce that stuff, to refer to those really hopeless cases you have heard of who want help and make you want to headdesk - you know, the kind that buys a monitor and thinks that's a computer, etc.. Even more funny since the DAU busses have actually been spotted in the parking lot in front of computer and electronics fairs and conventions - meaning someone actually must have travelled there in them.
* The Buick Lacrosse was renamed Buick Allure in Canada because in Quebecois slang not only is ''crosse'' a word meaning "fraud, swindle, rip off", but the verb "se crosser" (to cross oneself) also can mean "to jerk off". For the 2nd generation, the name was restored, and GM also began to offer replacement nameplates for those who are silly enough to want them.
** True, lacrosse is one of Canada's two official sports (hockey being the other). But then consider [[French Kiss|"tonsil hockey"]].
* A running joke is that the US-made Toyota Venza (2009-2017) sounds similar to the Japanese word "benza" - which means toilet seat.
* There is a public transport company in Locarno in Switzerland called FART (''Ferrovie Autolinee Regionali Ticinesi'', Italian for "Ticino Regional Railways and Buses"), much to the amusement of English-speaking tourists visiting the city. The Lonely Planet guide to Switzerland has a [[Crowning Moment of Funny]] with the line "that's the company name, not [[Fartillery|the means of propulsion]]". Many locals find this just as amusing, as most Swiss speak English.
* The wheelchair brand Quickie was actually ''meant'' to be a double entendre: one of its first slogans was "You need a Quickie."
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{{quote|"And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the very first Fokker airplane built in the world. The Dutch call it the mother Fokker."|'''Custodian at the Aviodome aviation museum, Schiphol airport Amsterdam.'''}}
* The Toyota MR 2 performance car mysteriously failed to sell in France. It was pointed out to the baffled executives that MR 2 is pronounced "em-air-deux" in French, or "est merdeux". Although a reasonably acceptable word in French nobody wanted a car called the "Toyota Is Shitty".
* The [[Every Car Is a Pinto|Ford Pinto]] is already a running joke because of its vulnerability in a rear-end collision. In Brazil? The vehicle was never sold there (as Ford owns factories in South America which made a different compact car - the Corcel) but still gets a laugh as "pinto" is "a small chicken" in Brazilian Portuguese sexual slang.
* The Nissan Cedric. According to legend, Australian advisors told Nissan that in Australia "Cedric" is or was slang for homosexual, to which the Nissan executives replied: "Australia has many homosexuals, therefore we shall sell many cars!"
* There is a story out there that when Chrysler began selling cars in Chinese markets, they did inexplicably poorly. It turned out that when "Chrysler" was transliterated into Mandarin Chinese, it became "about to die".
== Electronics and related ==
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** In an issue of the ''Badger'' comic, Mavis destroys Ham's computer, at which he says, "I hope you're satisified Madam! Now I no longer have the biggest Wang in town!"
** [[wikipedia:Wang Chung (band)|Everybody Wang Chung Tonight!]]
** [[The Simpsons (animation)|"Thank goodness he's drawn attention away from my shirt!"]]
** [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEF1F-VswsM Do you like my Wang?]
** Similarly, the Wang linker (named of course after the Chinese researcher who pioneered it) is a linking group in solid-state organic catalysis. Guaranteed to raise giggles among chemistry undergraduates when it comes up in lectures.
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** Wang tiles are studied by some geometers and logicians.
** A man in the Netherlands made a rather modest museum to Wang computers. What did he call it? Why, the [http://home.planet.nl/~janvdv/wang/wangmuseum.htm Small Wang Museum], of course!
** Lampshaded by Don Herron in one of the [[Hee Haw|Charlie Farquharson]] books, which described a farmer burying a septic tank while a city slicker tried to sell him an IBM computer. "While you'se been talking, I already Burroughed me a Honeywell into which [[Fun with Acronyms|I put my BM]]," ending with "...and, when he tried to show me his Wang, I threw him off the farm."
** Incidentally, though Wang Computers no longer exists, the name lives on as the name of the Wang Theatre in Boston, which led to it being used in a punchline in a local morning DJ's comedy sketch about "Viagra: the Musical".
** And then there is the story about them trying to rename their support system '''''Wang Care'''''
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Operator: Good morning Wang Care, how can I help.
Caller: Who the *#£! are you calling Wangcare.
----
Day 2 - Name change }}
* The Nintendo [[Wii]]'s name was intended to invoke playing with other people; as they say in the commercials, "Wii would like to play". However, it has inspired all kinds of jokes about gamers "running home so they can (play with their) Wii". Unlike Wang, Nintendo hasn't really embraced this one (The shape of the controller does not help).
** Shortly after people in the UK ran out of piss jokes on the day the name was first announced, somebody else realized that Nintendo's UK distributor - the company charged with the task of [[Incredibly Lame Pun|steady streams of Wii into the channel]] - was a German-based company called Koch Media. [[Hilarity Ensued]].
** "How long until I can have a Wii?" was a common refrain among prank callers to the pre-order line when the Wii was announced. "I don't think I can hold it that long" was their reply when they were told a few months. On a more tragic note, Jennifer Strange, a 28-year-old Sacramento woman attempting to win a Wii in a
*** Said contest was even called "Hold Your Wee for a Wii". This troper, having been a Sacramento resident at that time, confirms that Wii jokes were plentiful after that event.
** Americans, meanwhile, while they know of the aforementioned usage, are more likely to think in terms of "playing with their Wii", as in [[A Date with Rosie Palms]]. Oddly enough, the fact that the connotation is even more dirty may have worked out better overall, as it seems to have caused the joke to have become played out fairly quickly.
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** It's interesting to note that the prototype name, Nintendo Revolution, would have eliminated all of these problems.
*** Also, great advertising: "[[The Beatles (band)|So you say you want a Revolution?]]"
* Conversely, the Portuguese SIM card comes highly recommended, as it always says "yes".
* TrekStor was forced to rename the latest MP3 player in its i.Beat
** Of course, "i.Beat" by itself could be used in a couple gags a la "Wii". It's obviously nowhere near as bad, though.
* The word ''lund'' is Urdu and Punjabi slang for a man's genitalia, which is fair enough. Some British-Asian dialects spell and pronounce it ''lan'', which causes predictable hilarity when GCSE Information Technology classes are taught about local area networking.
** Translation from computer-speak to the real world are often unintentionally amusing. Courtesy of the unix command line, one might casually finger a co-worker, then fsck and mount one's hard drive.
*** Indeed, in French, "bit" is vaguely close to « la bitte » – which refers to a private part of the masculine anatomy. [[Hilarity Ensues]] regularly in basic binary algebra classes
** Also note late American race car driver [[wikipedia:Tiny Lund|Tiny Lund]].
* The name of the video game company [[Sega]] also happens to be a crude Italian slang term meaning "to masturbate." This is why, when Arsenal Football Club was sponsored by Sega, its shirts sported the logo of the company's [[Sega Dreamcast|then-current flagship product]] rather than the word Sega itself, Arsenal often finding itself playing in Italy or against Italian opposition.
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* Sega means to procrastinate or do something slowly in Swedish slang as well as tough in terms of food. SEGA must have had a hard time convincing people that the blast-processing really worked quickly and that Sonic was actually fast.
* An example that looks funny in English: the German electronics company Siemens. Though the German pronunciation, ZEE-mens, is retained in English-speaking countries, dirty-minded anglophones unfamiliar with German phonetics don't have to stretch their imaginations too far.
* A radio station on Akwesasne, a Mohawk nation territory that straddles the Ontario–New York State–Québec border, identifies as CKON (as a reference to the Mohawk word "sekon" or "she:kon", which means "hello"). An awkward choice, as phonetically this yields « c'est con » en français – which approximately translates to "that's stupid!" (Literally, « con » in French refers to the female anatomy, but in practice it's merely a very mild epithet for 'stupid' or 'clueless').
* The Commodore VIC-20 was originally going to be called the Vixen, until Commodore realized it would be unsellable in Germany, since "vixen" sounds like ''wichsen'' ("[[A Date with Rosie Palms|to wank]]"). They shortened it to VIC and came up with a backronym ('''V'''ideo '''I'''nterface '''C'''hip), but that too wouldn't fly in Germany, because "vic" sounds like ''Fick'' ("fuck"). They ended up calling it the VC-20 in Germany, VC standing for ''Volkscomputer'', and VIC-20 everywhere else.
== Television ==
* Apparently, the new name chosen by the [[
** Specifically, "syf" approximately translates to "filth/dirt", and is used as slang for syphilis. The additional 'y' at the end is the correct construction to make the "syf" word plural. Reasonable translations from Polish to English for "syfy" would include "filthy things" and "syphilitics".
*** The plural word, "syfy", is most commonly used as a slang for "pimples" (the spots on skin).
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** In Brazil, "Pica" (pronounced the same way) is slang for ''penis''. They didn't really change Pikachu's name, though.
** In Czech, "Pichu" is pronounced like the word for female genitalia. When the second generation of Pokémon arrived at the Czech Republic, kids everywhere ''had to'' joke about Pikachu's vagina.
* Both ''[[Happy Days]]'' and ''[[Joanie Loves Chachi]]'' had the character "Chachi," which sounds a lot like the Korean word for penis ("chaji").
== Film ==
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** [[Xkcd|Strictly speaking, it's better than the alternative, yet someone is clearly doing their job horribly wrong.]]
** Russian opera singer Feodor Chaliapin, a real-life [[Gentle Giant]], told the same story on himself. He was sitting next to a timid young French girl at a very fancy dinner party. Apparently the embarrassed/pregnant mistake can happen in French too, because he tried to say "You are shy" and she blushed crimson, muttered something and excused herself. When he found out later he'd said "you are pregnant" he could have died of embarrassment himself. Awww.
* IKEA got in trouble when it advertised its "Gutvik" brand bunk beds in
** The remake of ''[[Battlestar Galactica
*** The word "Frak" is in the original 70's series as well, it's just not [[Cluster F-Bomb|used every 5th line]] like it is in the reimagining.
*** "Frak" is also Swedish for "naughty". And, yes, it has the same connotations...
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* There is a brand of lightbulbs called Osram. In Polish it means "I will shit on [something]".
* The Turkish appliance company Arçelik sells its products under the name BEKO outside of Turkey due to the percieved pronunciation (ARSE-e-lick). (In Turkish it's more like 'Ar-jell-ik'.)
* Until World War I, Manufrance <ref>A mail order catalog that was also manufacturing conglomerate that made its own goods</ref> offered a brand of typewriters called "Typo". At least some of their goods were exported and the English use of the word was already around by the late 1800s.
== [[Video Games]] ==
* The cover of ''[[Left 4 Dead 2]]'' shows a zombie hand holding up 2 fingers, which happens to be the British equivalent of giving the middle finger. Considering the massive [[Fan Backlash]] when the game was announced, this seems appropriate. Valve did figure it out in time for the UK release though, and [https://web.archive.org/web/20130713013903/http://www.gamegrep.com/showimage.php?pos=1&newsid=23652 reversed the hand] so it became [[Woolseyism|the victory/peace sign]].
** Strangely, in Ireland some shops had the "fuck off" boxes and some shops had the "peace" boxes.
** The Japanese cover simply has the thumb [http://www.gamefaqs.com/xbox360/960511-left-4-dead-2/images/box-173855 tucked away] rather than torn off, due to stricter ratings for violence and the cultural association of missing fingers with the [[Yakuza]].
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== Clothing ==
* Australian singlet (what Americans call wife beaters) makers Chesty Bonds had an ad campaign where the buff model makes an "ok" symbol touching his thumb with his pointer finger to form a ring. Unfortunately when they tried to do business in Greece, they found out this was a symbol for being homosexual. The gesture has the same meaning in several other countries, and is simply obscene in a variety of others.
** In Japan it means pay me.
== Other ==
* In Venezuela, there are several towns named Moron. [[wikipedia:
** Those Morons are probably named after Moron, Spain, which is coincidentally the site of a NATO air base. This was used as a joke in ''[[Terminator]] 3'', when Moron briefly appears as one of the first two bases seized by Skynet<ref>The other is [[Batman]], Turkey</ref>
** There's also a city in Mongolia called Moron, though it is also [[wikipedia:
*** Fittingly, "Mongo" is German slang for "moron" (stemming from the word, "mongoloid," which is a rarely-used offensive term for someone who has Down's Syndrome).
*** Which comes full circle, considering the offensive origins of [[wikipedia:Mongoloid race|the term]].
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* The currency of Vietnam is the dong. (To date, the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times have shown great restraint in avoiding headlines such as "Bank of Vietnam Wants Stronger Dong.")
* The brand name Vicks was changed to Wick in Germany, because in German, "vick" is pronounced like ''Fick'', which means "fuck". And they most likely left the "s" out, because "Wicks" would sound like the German word for jerking off.
* A village in Norway is called "Hell" (meaning "luck" or an archaic word for a specific rock formation, pronounciation is the same as in English). Most of Norway being bilingual, the locals have great fun with it. The effect is slightly lessened by a large number of locations in English-speaking countries ''also'' named Hell.
* During the Cold War, Argentia used the Belgian designed FN FALO ('''F'''usil '''A'''utomatique '''Lo'''urd, an FAL/L1A1 beefed up to work better as a light machine gun), but since "falo" means "penis" in Spanish it went by a different name in Argentine service. Unfortunately they decided to call it the FAP ('''F'''uzil '''A'''utomático '''P'''esado), which isn't much that much of an improvement.
{{reflist}}
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[[Category:Language Tropes]]
[[Category:Advertising Tropes]]
[[Category:Bite
[[Category:Translation Tropes]]
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