French are elegant people. They are artists in everyday life, having a very good taste in everything. They don't like American tourists wearing jeans to go into their luxurious and exquisite five-star restaurants. So one of the restaurants put a notice outside its front door. It read “No trousers, please!”
A gourmet coffee was sold in Tokyo as an antidote to stress. Its name supposedly meant to people that it would smooth the troubled breast. Yet when it was printed in English, it turned out to be “Ease Your Bosoms”.
Swedes started a promotion stunt to promote the sales of their vacuum cleaner named Electro. Their original ad slogan was translated as “Nothing sucks Like Electro”.
The General Motors' selling of Chevrolet was very bad in South America. And the reason? The translation of this brand sounds like “nova”, which means “It doesn't go” in Spanish.
When Pepsi-cola invaded the huge Chinese and German markets, the efforts initially fizzled. The product's slogan, “Come alive with the Pepsi generation,” was rendered into German as “come out of the grave with Pepsi.” Coca-Cola also discovered something had gone wrong in Taiwan. The Chinese characters chosen for the world-famous product sound like “Bite the Wax Tadpole.”
A beer company’s slogan “Turn it loose” became, in Spanish, equivalent to “suffer from diarrhea.”
A company translated its sticky tape slogan into Japanese and came up with a sticky problem.
The slogan “Sticks like crazy” became literally “it sticks foolishly” in Japanese.
A tonic produced in China is made of royal jelly and is supposed to be very effective for some chronic diseases. Yet it was translated as “oral liquid”, which means “saliva” in English. In the brochure, it was described in this way: “it tastes like medicine”, when the language in the original meant to use it as a food therapy.
Even the wrong nonverbal cue can bring havoc to a product. A baby food company initially packaged their African products just the same as in the US—with a cute baby picture on the jar. They didn't realize that because so many Africans cannot read, nearly all pack aged products sold in Africa carry pictures of what is inside. Pureed baby! How horrible!
In an Asian city, where traffic is really very bad, to secure people's safety, the municipal government has built underground passageways. Pedestrians are asked to use them whenever they need to cross the main street. A sign was posted once on the roadside, pointing to the entrance to an underground passageway, intending to notify English-speaking passengers, “Go underground.”
We chuckled at such clumsy translations. Is there anything wrong in the language? We must be aware that few words and idioms can be literally translated. It's best to hire the best for translation. Don't take it for granted that as long as one speaks a little English, he is autonomously able to do the translation. It takes a while to learn to be a good translator.
1.“No trousers, please!” sounds funny on the front door of a five-star restaurant, because it could mean“（ ）”in English.
2.From the passage, you may guess that Chevrolet is most probably（ ）.
3.Any product with a cute baby picture on the jar will most probably （ ） in Africa, according to the author.
4.The Chinese characters chosen for Coca-Cola （ ） in Taiwan first.
5.Which of the following is NOT true according to the passage?
