TEXT I
The text below is divided into Part I and Part II
Part I
Lost In Translation: Language Blunders Can Sully Ad Efforts
Even Small Mistakes Can Cost Marketers Sales And Confidence; Want Fries With That Underwear?
Message to marketers: One man's pizza may be another man's pants.
That is a lesson at least one U.S. advertiser would like to have known before trying to market his folded-over pizza, called a calzone, to Spanish speakers: To them, calzone means underwear. The poor translation was one example on a list of botched advertising and branding efforts cited in a recent national survey of people who speak English as a second language.
Of the 513 people surveyed, 57% said they had spotted advertising that was incorrectly translated from English into other lan-guages. Though the blunders are often humorous, they can cost the advertiser sales, suggested the survey, conducted by New York based translation service TransPerfect Translations Inc. Close to 50% of respondents said they simply tune out the message if an ad is poorly translated, and about 65% interpret bad translations as evidence that the advertiser doesn't care about the consumer. Even small mistakes, such as advertising a store where everything costs a dollar as "Un Dollar," rather than the correct Spanish "Un Dolar," was enough to put off potential customers, the survey found.
"It makes a lot of people feel negatively about a product," Says Liz Elting, cofounder of TransPerfect Translations. Respondents were actually offended by some advertising slip-ups, like the translation of "point" into Spanish as "puta," which means prostitute. Coca-Cola Co. had what was probably among the earliest translation gaffes for a global brand, running into trouble in the 1920s when shopkeepers in China tried to come up with characters that sounded like Coke. Depending on the dialect, the literal transla-tions ranged from "bite the wax tadpole" to "female horse stuffed with wax."
The Atlanta-based parent company remedied the problem by launching a contest to come up with the best translation. Coke settled on "happiness in the mouth," a pitch by a professor from Shanghai. Coca-Cola, which registered the name as a Chinese trademark, says it generally has managed to avoid translation errors over the years by allowing local units of the company to do their own ad-vertising, rather than trying to translate campaigns globally.
The best translation to contest in “… by launching a contest to come up with” (§6) is:
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