"NLS... It's not just an acronym... it's an adventure!" joke
From the rehu-l list where it had been posted from the Whim list.
From "American Demographics" magazine:
Here's a look at how shrewd American business people translate their slogans into foreign languages:
When Braniff translated a slogan touting its upholstery, "Fly in leather," it came out in Spanish as "Fly naked."
Coors put its slogan, "Turn it loose," into Spanish, where it was read as "Suffer from diarrhea."
Chicken magnate Frank Perdue's line, "It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken," sounds much more interesting in Spanish: "It takes a sexually stimulated man to make a chicken affectionate."
When Vicks first introduced its cough drops on the German market, they were chagrined to learn that the German pronunciation of "v" is f - which makes "Vicks" in German the phonetic equivalent of "sexual penetration."
Not to be outdone, Puffs tissues tried later to introduce its product, only to learn that "Puff" in German is a colloquial term for a whorehouse.
The Chevy Nova never sold well in Spanish speaking countries. "No va" means "doesn't go" in Spanish.
When Gerber first started selling baby food in Africa, they used the same packaging as here in the USA - with the cute baby on the label. Later they found out that in Africa that companies routinely put pictures on the label of what's inside since more people can't read.
When Pepsi started marketing its products in China a few years back, they translated their slogan, "Come alive, you're in the Pepsi generation" pretty literally. The slogan in Chinese really meant, "Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back from the Grave."
When Coca-Cola first shipped to China, they named the product something that when pronounced sounded like "Coca-Cola." The only problem was that the characters used meant "Bite the wax tadpole." They later changed to a set of characters that mean "Happiness in the mouth."
A hair products company, Clairol, introduced the "Mist Stick", a curling iron, into Germany to find out that mist is slang for manure. Not too many people had use for the manure stick.
"DeForest has said in many newspaper and over his signature that it would be possible to transmit the human voice across the Atlantic before many years. Based on these absurd and deliberately misleading statements, the misguided public... has been persuaded to purchase stock in his company."
- U. S. District Attorney, prosecuting inventor Lee Deforest for fraud, 1913
Not enough votes...