HARIBO
Haribo macht Kinder froh und Erwachsene ebenso
This well-known tune is truly unforgettable: “Haribo è la bontà, che si gusta ad ogni età” especially for Italians who grew up in the 1980s.
Do you know what the non-transcreated translation into English would have been?
“Haribo makes children happy and adults as well”.
A whole different feel, don’t you think?
SWIFFER
When Swiffer’s the one, consider it done!
With a literal translation in Italian, we would have lost so much of the original slogan, for example, the rhyme.
The result? A very good transcreation in Italian:
La polvere non dura perché Swiffer la cattura.
ESSO
Put a tiger in your tank
With this example, we have to go back a few years, far back to 1959.
Esso’s slogan was
“Put a tiger in your tank”
which in Italian was translated as
“Metti una tigre nel tuo carro armato”.
Just a few years after the end of a terrible war, advertisers felt this kind of slogan wouldn’t have been a big hit with the public, in fact, it would’ve probably backfired.
And unknowingly, they used transcreation techniques and came up with this:
“Metti una tigre nel motore”, which means “Put a tiger in your engine”.
Needless to say, the message was much appreciated by the Italian public.
PAMPERS
Peach or stork?
The Diaper issue in Japan.
Did you know that babies are delivered to their parents by a huge peach in Japan, and not by a stork?
Procter & Gamble, one of the largest corporations in the world, paid a high price for failing to consider this key cultural element when it launched its classic diapers on the Japanese market – in a package with a stork!
The public did not like the idea at all, they found it bizarre, so it was a huge fiasco.
Perhaps they would have been more successful if they had gone with Momotarō, the peach boy, with a tailor-made catchphrase.
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