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Thank you, Thomas.

I remember the same example from the former USSR, circa 1990, where I grew
up. There was a brand of drinking water sold by a US company – “Blue Water”
– which sounds like “vomit” in Ukrainian and Russian. It sounded funny, led
to many jokes and I’ve seen a number of times this used as an example of
“bad” marketing.

However, what’s not mentioned is that a matter of weeks the product become
widely recognized and talked about. I don’t exclude that the move was
intentional as the “bad sounding” name didn’t seem to do much damage, but
it definitely helped attract attention and, I am guessing, did more good
than bad overall.

So what’s presented as “ignorant Americans” may have actually been a
brilliant marketing campaign. I just don’t believe no one pointed out the
problem before the commercials were aired, and most likely it was an
informed decision to keep the brand name and not use a different one.



Vas



*From:* Weber, Thomas [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
*Sent:* Saturday, June 16, 2012 11:04 AM
*To:* [log in to unmask]
*Subject:* RE: [AIB-L] FW: [AIB-L] Perpetuating falsehoods: The Chevrolet
Nova sold poorly in Spanish-speaking countries because its name translates
as "doesn't go" in Spanish



Hi Vas,



I have no idea if any of these are true or not. I just wanted to comment on
the “Nothing sucks like an Electrolux.” That was an ad campaign I remember.
I am a native English speaker, and I thought that was one of the funniest
ads I ever saw. I do not know, but I think it was an intentional play on
words by Electrolux. I think they were capitalizing on what would be
considered a mistake in order to create a memorable commercial, which
worked for me.



Thomas

Thomas Weber

Strategic Management PhD Candidate
Old Dominion University

2160 Constant Hall

Norfolk, VA  23589

http://orgs.odu.edu/badsa/tweber.html







*From:* Vasyl Taras [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
*Sent:* Saturday, June 16, 2012 10:05 AM
*To:* [log in to unmask]
*Subject:* Re: [AIB-L] FW: [AIB-L] Perpetuating falsehoods: The Chevrolet
Nova sold poorly in Spanish-speaking countries because its name translates
as "doesn't go" in Spanish



Just curious if anyone knows anything about the following “blunders”
(before I use them in my class):



Honda Fit sold as Jazz in most of Asia and Europe for “Fit” being an F-word



Irish Mist and Mist Stick being a problem in Germany, where “mist” is an
S-word



Umbro’s Zyklon shoe model removed after discovering that Zyklon was also
the name of the gas used by Nazis in gas chambers.



I also mention a few mistakes made by foreign companies in the U.S. (Ikea’s
Fartfull desk, locum’s Christmas logo with “o” substituted with a heart
symbol, Electrolux’s slogan “Nothing Sucks Like Electrolux”, and
Volkswagen’s Bora sold as “Jetta” in the U.S. (actually a good example of
avoiding a problem) - but those seem to be obvious blunders as attested by
the smiles of my English-speaking students.



Any of these are also urban myths?



Vas





*From:* Romie Littrell [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
*Sent:* Friday, June 15, 2012 8:52 PM
*To:* [log in to unmask]
*Subject:* Re: [AIB-L] FW: [AIB-L] Perpetuating falsehoods: The Chevrolet
Nova sold poorly in Spanish-speaking countries because its name translates
as "doesn't go" in Spanish



Tunga is correct. The Ford Pinto was never sold in Brasil, even under
another model name. Marcelo de Castro Bastos informs (and confirmed
elsewhere): The Ford Corcel was a totally unrelated product, the result of
a joint project by the Brazilian subsidiary of Willys Overland and French
automaker Renault (Willys used to make Renault cars, like the Dauphine and
Gordini, under license in Brazil.) When Ford acquired Willys's Brazilian
operation, they inherited the almost-finished project and decided to launch
it under their own brand. They MAY have considered to use the "Pinto" brand
on it, but saner heads prevailed and decided on the "Corcel" name in order
to keep to the "horse" theme Ford seemed to like at the time. The "Pinto"
name was never used in Brazil.

This site has a random collection of communication on these topics:
http://www.i18nguy.com/translations.html

Romie Frederick Littrell, BA, MBA, PhD, FIAIR
Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand
IV. 1st stanza, War is Kind and Other Lines, Stephen Crane, 1899
A little ink more or less!
It surely can't matter?
Even the sky and the opulent sea,
The plains and the hills, aloof,
Hear the uproar of all these books.
But it is only a little ink more or less.

--- On *Sat, 16/6/12, Kiyak, Tunga <[log in to unmask]>* wrote:


From: Kiyak, Tunga <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: [AIB-L] FW: [AIB-L] Perpetuating falsehoods: The Chevrolet
Nova sold poorly in Spanish-speaking countries because its name translates
as "doesn't go" in Spanish
To: [log in to unmask]
Received: Saturday, 16 June, 2012, 10:32 AM

That’s most likely an urban legend as well.  The claim is that Ford Pinto
was renamed and sold as Ford Corcel after the blunder was noticed.  The
problem with that is that Corcel was actually introduced in Brazil in 1968
(and developed in Brazil by a company that was later acquired by Ford).
That’s 2 years BEFORE Ford Pinto was ever marketed (it was introduced in
the US in 1970).



Doing some quick Googling, there is some brief research about the Ford
Pinto claim at http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=619 and it reaches
the same conclusion…



Tunga





*From:* Ghoshal, Animesh [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
*Sent:* Friday, June 15, 2012 18:10
*To:* Kiyak, Tunga; [log in to unmask]
*Subject:* RE: [AIB-L] FW: [AIB-L] Perpetuating falsehoods: The Chevrolet
Nova sold poorly in Spanish-speaking countries because its name translates
as "doesn't go" in Spanish



Thank you, Romie and Tunga, for alerting us to the possibility that some of
the “facts” used textbook discussions of the cultural aspects of
international business are not quite factual.



I wonder if anyone has investigated the claim that the Ford Pinto had to be
renamed in Brazil after Ford realized that in Portuguese slang pinto is a
small male appendage. Is this also an urban legend?



Animesh Ghoshal



*From:* Kiyak, Tunga
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]<https://webmail.odu.edu/owa/UrlBlockedError.aspx>
*Sent:* Friday, June 15, 2012 4:08 PM
*To:* [log in to unmask] <https://webmail.odu.edu/owa/UrlBlockedError.aspx>
*Subject:* Re: [AIB-L] FW: [AIB-L] Perpetuating falsehoods: The Chevrolet
Nova sold poorly in Spanish-speaking countries because its name translates
as "doesn't go" in Spanish



I number of us had engaged in a similar discussion back in May 2002 on
Global Interact Network (GINLIST – a now defunct discussion list).  There
were several translation examples that we discussed as urban legends; the
Chevy Nova example, the Coca-Cola being translated into Chinese as "bite
the wax tadpole", and Pepsi’s campaign in Taiwan being translated as "Pepsi
will bring your ancestors back from the dead" as well as others.



A few of us tried to track the citations in the textbooks to their original
sources and quickly went nowhere. At the end, we found several books that
simply cited each other or mentioning these cases as anecdotes without any
credible references. The earliest mention of the Chevy Nova ‘blunder’ we
could find was a WSJ article from January 13, 1977 written by a staff
reporter discussing the business of technical translation.  The conclusion
of the discussion was that these are all urban legends that have been
victims of ‘consensual validation’. Once a first few cites came up, lazy
writers who only do cursory research use those citations as validation of
the statement as a fact and publish them.  Additional such publications
only strengthen the false validation process.



What’s so surprising is that the Snopes article was already up online in
2002, so the case has been researched and classified as urban legend for at
least a decade.  Yet it continues to be mentioned frequently as a brand
blunder.



Tunga

--

Tunga Kiyak, Ph.D.

Managing Director

Academy of International Business (AIB)



*From:* Blanco, R Ivan
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]<https://webmail.odu.edu/owa/UrlBlockedError.aspx>
*Sent:* Friday, June 15, 2012 15:47
*To:* [log in to unmask] <https://webmail.odu.edu/owa/UrlBlockedError.aspx>
*Subject:* [AIB-L] FW: [AIB-L] Perpetuating falsehoods: The Chevrolet Nova
sold poorly in Spanish-speaking countries because its name translates as
"doesn't go" in Spanish



Romie,



Finally someone writes about this myth!  I have been saying the same for a
long time to my students in International Business and Cross-Cultural
Management because all textbooks use that as an example of blunders in
language, and the Nova thing became a classic which no one had questioned
before. I lived in Venezuela during the introduction of the Chevy Nova and
it was a very well accepted car in that market as mentioned in your e-mail.
I have said to my students and to anyone else willing to listen that in
Spanish speaking countries “nova” will be associated more with the word
“nuevo” (which means new), because the Latin root of “Nuevo” is pretty
close to “Nova.”



Thanks for sharing!



Ivan Blanco







*From:* Romie Littrell
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]<https://webmail.odu.edu/owa/UrlBlockedError.aspx>
*Sent:* Thursday, June 14, 2012 3:35 PM
*To:* [log in to unmask] <https://webmail.odu.edu/owa/UrlBlockedError.aspx>
*Subject:* [AIB-L] Perpetuating falsehoods: The Chevrolet Nova sold poorly
in Spanish-speaking countries because its name translates as "doesn't go"
in Spanish



*A False Claim:*   The Chevrolet Nova sold poorly in Spanish-speaking
countries because its name translates as "doesn't go" in Spanish.

Summarised from: www.snopes.com, Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2012
by Barbara and David P. Mikkelson.

I’m still seeing publications and comments with the incorrect and
misleading legend of “The Chevrolet Nova sold poorly in Spanish-speaking
countries because its name translates as "doesn't go" in Spanish. I become
increasingly concerned about the diligence and responsibility of authors of
textbooks and articles. As snopes.com points out, the ‘Chevy Nova legend
lives on in countless marketing textbooks, is repeated in numerous business
seminars, and is a staple of newspaper and magazine columnists who need a
pithy example of human folly. Perhaps someday this apocryphal tale will
become what it should be: an illustration of how easily even "experts" can
sometimes fall victim to the very same dangers they warn us about.’

Part of the fiction is that GM executives were baffled until someone
finally pointed out to them that "nova" translates as "doesn't go" in
Spanish. The embarrassed automobile giant changed the model name to the
Caribe, and sales of the car took off. Actually Caribe is a Volkwagen
model, not a Chevy. The truth is that the Chevrolet Nova's name didn't
significantly affect its sales: it sold well in both its major
Spanish-language markets, Mexico and Venezuela. (Its Venezuelan sales
figures actually surpassed GM's expectations.)

From snopes.com: The original Chevrolet Nova (initially the Chevy II) hit
the U.S. market in 1962. (This car should not be confused with the smaller,
front wheel drive vehicle which was produced in 1985 as a joint venture
between General Motors and Toyota and also assigned the Nova name.) Between
1972 and 1978 the Chevrolet Nova was also sold in Mexico and several other
Spanish-speaking countries, primarily Venezuela. Shortly afterwards the
great "Nova" legend arose, a legend which a little linguistic analysis
shows it to be improbable:

First of all, the phrase "no va" (literally "doesn't go") and the word
"nova" are distinct entities with different pronunciations in Spanish: the
former is two words and is pronounced with the accent on the second word;
the latter is one word with the accent on the first syllable. Assuming that
Spanish speakers would naturally see the word "nova" as equivalent to the
phrase "no va" and think "Hey, this car doesn't go!" is akin to assuming
that English speakers would spurn a dinette set sold under the name *Notable
* because nobody wants a dinette set that doesn't include a table.

Although "no va" can be literally translated as "no go," it would be a
curious locution for a speaker of Spanish to use in reference to a car.
Just as an English speaker would describe a broken-down car by saying that
it "doesn't run" rather than it "doesn't go," so a Spanish speaker would
refer to a malfunctioning automobile by saying "no marcha" or "no funciona"
or "no camina" rather than "no va."

Pemex (the Mexican government-owned oil monopoly) sold (and still sells)
gasoline in Mexico under the name "Nova." If Mexicans were going to
associate anything with the Chevrolet Nova based on its name, it would
probably be this gasoline. In any case, if Mexicans had no compunctions
about filling the tanks of their cars with a type of gasoline whose name
advertised that it "didn't go," why would they reject a similarly-named
automobile?

This legend assumes that a handful of General Motors executives launched a
car into a foreign market and remained in blissful ignorance about a
possible adverse translation of its name. Even if nobody in Detroit knew
enough rudimentary Spanish to notice the coincidence, the Nova could not
have been brought to market in Mexico and/or South America without the
involvement of numerous Spanish speakers engaged to translate user manuals,
prepare advertising and promotional materials, communicate with the network
of Chevrolet dealers in the target countries, etc. In fact, GM was aware of
the translation and opted to retain the model name "Nova" in
Spanish-speaking markets anyway, because they (correctly) felt the matter
to be unimportant.
*
Additional information from snopes.com:
*http://www.novaresource.org/history.htm
Debunking several urban legends: Ricks, David A.   *Blunders in
International Business <http://www.snopes.com/sources/business/blunders.htm>
*. Cambridge, U.S.A.: Blackwell, 1993.   ISBN 1-55786-414-4   (p. 35).

Romie Frederick Littrell, BA, MBA, PhD, FIAIR
Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand
IV. 1st stanza, War is Kind and Other Lines, Stephen Crane, 1899
A little ink more or less!
It surely can't matter?
Even the sky and the opulent sea,
The plains and the hills, aloof,
Hear the uproar of all these books.
But it is only a little ink more or less.

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