Taglines that Get Lost in Translation

A few years ago, when Pepsi tried to translate its motto, “Come Alive: You’re in the Pepsi Generation” into Chinese the direct translation resulted in, “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.” Microsoft’s tag line for their new operating system, Vista, turned out to be a disparaging term for a frumpy old woman in Latvia. And Motorola’s “Hellomoto” ring tone sounds like “Hello, Fatty” in India. “Bert Esselink, a globalization consultant for the Waltham, Massachusetts-based translation agency Lionbridge Technologies, feels it’s a mistake to attempt to translate these slogans. ‘I think the phrase ‘translating advertising slogans’ is not really appropriate,’ he says. ‘These types of slogans are hardly ever translated literally and if they are, they are ‘converted’ to another language. It’s usually a very creative process that consists of finding an equivalent expression in the target language that conveys a similar message to the original.’ “ (Brand Channel)