Suzuki Motor Corp no
idea that the name "Hustler" for its new, boxy mini-car aimed at
outdoorsy Japanese customers may cause confusion among English speakers for its
association with an adult magazine.
Taking words from
foreign dictionaries without checking how they might be received by native
speakers has produced countless products with unintentionally unsavory names.
The name Hustler
was chosen by Suzuki to conjure the image of agility, as well as invite
nostalgia from customers who remembered an off-road motorbike released in 1969
called the Hustler 250.
The Hustler
follows a string of other Japan-made cars to confuse speakers of foreign
languages, such as Daihatsu Motor Co Ltd's Naked in 2000 and Isuzu Motors Ltd's
1983 Bighorn. Similarly a car named Nova created lot of confusion in Latin American
countries as Nova means no go in Spanish.
Spanish speakers
were taken aback by Mazda Motor Corp's Laputa, a derogatory word for sex
worker, while Mitsubishi Motors Corp sold its Pajero model as the Montero in
Spanish-speaking countries as the former is slang for sexual self-pleasure.
A tubular
chocolate snack called Collon and an isotonic sports drink named Pocari Sweat,
for example, bear unfortunate associations with bodily functions.
While many brand
names around the world don't translate across borders - the Iranian washing
powder Barf, which means snow in Persian, or a Swedish chocolate bar called
Plopp, are very uncomfortable names. So are names like Pantene and Puck which
sound dangerously like ladies undergarments and vomit. Many companies often use
foreign words for how they sound, with little regard to their original meaning.
This is partly due
to foreign words having an exotic ring, much like how Chinese characters are
seen by Westerners as poetic or profound choices for tattoos even if the
results don't make much sense to native speakers. But many firms often fail to
check if a name 'travels' because of historical reasons, marketers say.
Websites like
Engrish.com revel in strange uses of English across Asia, including neighboring
South Korea's snack maker Lotte Confectionary Co Ltd's Crunky Ball Nude.
