Eat your fingers off & other tales

We all love those fabulously entertaining stories about marketing slogans disastrously mistranslated for foreign markets. Who can forget the urban myth of Vauxhall Nova misfiring in Spain because No Va means It doesn’t go in Spanish? According to legend, its name had to be changed to Corsa in Spain due to all the embarrassment. In reality though, the car model was referred to as Corsa in the Spanish market from the outset— so, perhaps Vauxhall’s marketing campaign was actually pretty on the ball from the get-go. Meanwhile, it’s said that its rival, Ford, had little success with its slogan in Belgium, whereby the English-Belgian translation supposedly turned Every car has a high-quality body into Every car has a high-quality corpse. Arguably, the latter doesn’t quite set the scene for a wholesome family road trip. In a similarly morbid translation gone wrong, Pepsi Cola’s Come Alive! You’re in the Pepsi generation strapline allegedly became Pepsi