{"id":467,"date":"2010-09-15T11:01:15","date_gmt":"2010-09-15T01:01:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.privatefleet.com.au\/?p=467"},"modified":"2023-08-22T22:38:08","modified_gmt":"2023-08-22T12:38:08","slug":"wordsmiths-in-the-poo-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/home\/wordsmiths-in-the-poo-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Wordsmiths in the 'poo' again"},"content":{"rendered":"

In our ‘Motoring Myths’<\/a> quiz last month we alluded to funny translations for car names. The example we gave  ( ‘Holden’ means underpants in Swahili) was a myth. But truth is often stranger than fiction, witness Audi and their latest creation, an electric car that has been named the “e-tron”.<\/em> Sounds harmless enough, unless you’re French, where it is similar in meaning to ‘merde’ – or ‘crap’. No doubt that will put the Audi wordsmiths in the vernacular!<\/p>\n

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Audi e-tron<\/p><\/div>\n

But this is not the first time it’s happened. General Motors launched its ‘Nova” <\/em>car in Latin American markets, but hastened to a name change when they found that a rough translation into Spanish means ‘Don’t Go”.<\/p>\n

In Australia we are familiar with the Mitsubishi Pajero, and again that needed a hasty name change in Spanish markets as it’s a Spanish slang word for masturbation.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most embarrassing name failure was undertaken by Ford in the US when they marketed their very successful Ford ‘Pinto’<\/em>  car. But it was a dismal failure in Brazil, because in Brazilian it means ‘small penis’. No wonder it flopped! http:\/\/credit-n.ru\/offers-zaim\/glavfinance-online-zaymi.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In our ‘Motoring Myths’ quiz last month we alluded to funny translations for car names. The example we gave  ( ‘Holden’ means underpants in Swahili) was a myth. But truth is often stranger than fiction, witness Audi and their latest creation, an electric car that has been named the “e-tron”. Sounds harmless enough, unless you’re French, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-home"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=467"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15102,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467\/revisions\/15102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}