(Pieter Bruegel’s “The Tower of Babel.”)

This week at Big, we were discussing a marketing project that will require reaching an audience whose first language is not English. There are, of course, a number of distinctive challenges with such a project, and accurate translation is only one of them. For example, you have to understand cultural differences, too. What happens when you don’t? Well, you may never get your audience’s attention. You may not be persuasive if you do. Or you may end up sending an entirely different message than you intended, even if your translation is technically correct. In fact, advertising is replete with cautionary tales, in which a company either didn’t get the translation of its message quite right, or it didn’t understand how the cultural differences at play would affect that translation. Below you’ll find a few of the more notorious examples, some probably apocryphal, but all instructive. Or at least amusing.

Come alive with the Pepsi Generation. When translated into Chinese, the message became: Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave.

I saw the pope, translated into Spanish and printed on T-shirts, read: I saw the potato.

Turn it loose, a former Coors tagline, was translated into Spanish as: Suffer from diarrhea.

Nova may be a fine name for a car in English, but no va in Spanish means “doesn’t go.”

Another car mishap—GM sold its vehicles in Belgium with the tag Body by Fisher, which translated as: Corpse by Fisher.

Remember the success of Got Milk? A little less effective in Spanish: Are you lactating?

Finally, and perhaps most famously, is the case of Electrolux, the Scandinavian vacuum manufacturer. They had enjoyed great success in the UK with a tagline that, since it was already in English, didn’t even need translating for the American market. Those cultural differences do matter, though. Like when a word carries additional meanings in one country that it doesn’t have in another. To wit: Nothing sucks like an Electrolux.