Sometimes, funny wrong expressions in a billboard are meant to be noticed to provoke a laugh. In fact, certain brands base their entire marketing efforts in this style of communication. Spelling errors, however, can also be an accident. With good or bad results, who knows? It all depends on the luck factor.

When a global company is arriving to a new market, the logical first step is to make sure the audience is already familiar with the product or service. Thus, an advertising campaign must take place starting before the opening of the chain’s stores. Sometimes, this step takes a long time, even several months, especially if the brand is not exactly a big famous one.

This is when the work of a good translator enters in action. A good localization work will ensure that the local audience embraces the new products offered, creating (luckily) a so called “brandlove” from the very start. Communication is key to achieve that, and we’re not only speaking of creative content (excellent localized slogan, amazing copy…) but also about the effectiveness of the translated words.

Sometimes, errors in the translation can just finish the reputation of the brand even before the arrival of the company. Or, perhaps, it could only amuse the audience. This happened to an American pen company’s slogan who asked the Mexican people if they were pregnant, instead of “embarrassed”, because translation of pregnancy is “embarazo”.

How these mistakes can even happen? The easy answer is that the company hired a bad translator. Is that the only explanation? Of course not. The problem could reside exactly in the opposite reason: the company decided to use Machine Translation to avoid the hiring of a human, professional translator because, hey, who would spend money if technology is at the touch of your hand?

Perhaps this wasn’t even the case. Maybe it was just a typo and the editor just didn’t do a good job revising the translated text. Or, what if the person to blame is the designer, who didn’t check some missing spots when preparing the size format of the file? Or even printer, whose billboard had issues for just an ink problem? If it’s a TV commercial or YouTube video, then the person in charge of subtitles was responsible.

Anyway, the translator is usually the person who everyone thinks had it all wrong. He’s the visible part of an international campaign for these matters. But even a native-speaker translator can ruin a localization work if the client provided a clever wording that can work well in the source language (maybe a joke) but it’s just not well received by the local audience.

Or it could be, you know, really your fault as a translator. You’re human, and obody is perfect.

For whatever reason, if this ever happens to you, let’s just hope you face a fortunate accident instead of a regretful one. Remember, some brands become memorable for such accidents. Good luck with that!