Other classics Oops…

- Chevrolet’s “No va” cars in Romance language countries (my favorite).

- Citroen cars in North America.

- IBM using Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp in the UK.

One more that’s local to NYC – The Italian restaurant, Babo, translates to “idiot” in Korean. (Sorry, Mario.)

Snopes is hardly the last word on some things. Prof. Ricks is well-known for his research in international marketing errors; and I would take his word (along with Harvard and Reader’s Digest) over the Snopes supposed “debunking.”

In my own personal experience I remember working on a menu translation project with a United Airlines exec who told me about some of his newly arrived Korean countrymen being delighted that canned dog meat was seemingly readily available on US supermarket shelves (dog is a delicacy in Korean cuisine).

They couldn’t read English and were depending, naturally enough, on the label pictures on canned dog food.