1. When Parker Pen marketed a pen in Mexico, its ads were supposed to say, “It won’t slip out of your pocket and embarrass you.” Instead, the company thought the word “embarazar” (get pregnant) meant to embarrass, so the ad read, “It won’t leak into her pocket and get her pregnant.”

2. In Spain, when Coors Brewing Company put their slogan, “Turn it loose” into Spanish; it was read as “Suffers from diarrhoea”.

3. When Braniff International Airways translated a slogan promoting its upholstery, “Fly in leather,” it came out in Spanish as “Fly naked.”

4. When Pepsi began marketing its products in China a few years ago, they translated their slogan, “Pepsi brings you back to life,” quite literally. The catchphrase in Chinese actually meant “Pepsi bring your ancestors back from the grave.”

5. Chicken magnate Frank Perdue’s line, “It takes a tough man to make a chicken tender,” sounds much more interesting in Spanish: “It takes a sexually stimulated man to make a chicken loving.”

6. Scandinavian vacuum manufacturer Electrolux used the following in an American campaign: “Nothing stinks like an Electrolux.”

7. A hair product company, Clairol, introduced the “Mist Stick,” a curling iron, to Germany only to find out that mist is slang for manure. Not many people had a use for the dung stick.

8. The American slogan for Salem cigarettes, “Salem-Feeling Free,” was translated to the Japanese market as “By smoking Salem, you will feel so refreshed that your mind will seem free and empty.”

9. PepsiCola lost its dominant market share to Coca-Cola in Southeast Asia when Pepsi changed the color of its vending machines and refrigerators from a deep “royal” blue to a light “ice” blue, since light blue is associated with death and mourning in Southeast Asia.

10. We can’t forget Chevrolet’s attempt to launch the Nova — Spanish translation, “Doesn’t Go” — in Mexico (as it turns out, this seems to be an urban legend and can’t be verified). Many sources on the Internet relieve that this is not true.