funny

[jaeclectic]

The company I work for recently decided to rename their flagship product from MGA (mail gateway appliance) to ESA (email security appliance), prompting the following message from a Japanese-speaking member of staff:

... we are all about eating our own dogfood. We do this by installing bleeding edge builds on our internal servers.

Now, with the ESA branding, the whole armada of IronPort appliances are our dogfood. Or at least the ones in Japan. Why? Because 'esa' is the word for 'dogfood' in Japanese. More accurately it is any low-quality food given to animals.

He goes on to suggest caution in pronouncing it Eee-Ess-Ay rather than essa, especially in Asian markets.

*giggle*

Comments

[gen9.livejournal.com]

Hee hee hee, that reminds of a marketing class I took where localization gaffs were discussed in a book called "Crossing the Chasm":

- Chevy trying to sell the Nova in Mexico when "no va" means "no go" in Spanish

- In Chinese, the Kentucky Fried Chicken slogan "finger-lickin' good" was read as "eat your fingers off"

- The Pepsi slogan "Come alive with the Pepsi Generation" was read as "Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead" in Taiwan

- Coca-Cola in China was first rendered as Ke-kou-ke-la which Coke corporate realized meant "bite the wax tadpole" only after thousands of signs and labels had been printed up. Currently, Coke uses "ko-kou-ko-le" which loosely translates to "happiness in the mouth" and took much research of Chinese characters to determine.

I loosely remembered all of these blunders and found the details here after googling for them: http://forum.researchinfo.com/showpost.php?s=a7f7dd684324193886ae98155ff940bd&p=950&postcount=12