Bacardi concocted a fruity drink with the name 'Pavian' to suggest French chic ... but 'Pavian' means 'baboon' in German.

A peanut-packed chocolate bar targeted at Japanese teenagers needing while cramming for exams ran headlong into a belief that eating peanuts and chocolate causes nosebleeds.

Coors slogan, "Turn it Loose," translated into Spanish as "Suffer From Diarrhea."

Puffs tissues had a bad name in Germany since "Puff" is a colloquial term for whorehouse.

Jolly Green Giant translated into Arabic means "Intimidating Green Ogre."

When Coca-Cola first came to China, it was given a similar sounding name ... but the characters used for the name meant "Bite the Wax Tadpole."

Chicken magnate Frank Perdue wants us to know that "It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken," but the Spanish translation came out as "It takes a sexually stimulated man to make a chicken affectionate."

Translation Problems

The Chevrolet Nova sold less well in Latin America than Chevrolet's marketeers had forecast. It was then brought to the company's attention that in Spanish, "No va" means "doesn't go".

When Coca-Cola was first sold in China, its erstwhile slogan "Coke adds life" was translated into Chinese. The Chinese ideograms, when translated back into English, read "Coke brings your ancestors back from the dead". This might have affected the sales.

The grocery store chain Konsum in Sweden had a minor problem with their Hungarian customers shoplifting in the chain's convenience store Servus. "Servus" means "yours for free" in Hungarian.

One of the senior editors of a Swedish motor magazine quite surprisingly refused to travel to the U.S. for an international motor magazine convention. He had been attending the previous year, and blankly stated that he wouldn't go again. He worked for Fart Magazine, "fart" being the Swedish word for speed.

Some scientists were testing a program that could translate from English to Chinese and back again. They fed into their computer the English phrase "Out of sight, out of mind," and out came some Chinese ideograms. Since none of the scientists in the room at that moment knew Chinese well enough to determine whether the computer's Chinese translation had captured the spirit of the English phrase, they fed the ideograms back into the computer. The translation back into English read "Invisible idiot".