Language

Written for Communicate, ran under my own byline I think.

Language

Chris, the young man with the strange facial hair that runs this magazine, asked me to write a piece about multicultural marketing. I tried, but in the end decided that it was probably best not to add to the already significant pile of utter pish that has been contributed on this knottiest of issues. But it did set me to thinking about the glorious world of multilingual marketing: a world of misunderstanding and bloopers that deserves celebration: not least because we live in such a rich multilingual environment that linguistic oddities totally surround us here in the Gulf.

I’m particularly fond of those HSBC ads, you know the ones where some bloke finds out too late that shaking hands in Kamchatka means you want to be boiled alive in fish sauce. I’d love to see one based in Dubai, the Home Of All Misunderstanding and also, incidentally, the place where you can visit the ‘Wanton Chinese and Philipina Restaurant’. I’ve often wanted to go in and meet one of the waitresses. I can only imagine it would be entertaining. Or how about, sadly now departed, Umm Al Qawain’s famous ‘Grubbi Cafeteria’? There’s a money changers in the old souq in Kuwait called ‘Foolhardi Exchange, which delighted me. And a shop in Sharjah called ‘Bottom Cleaners’, which just goes beyond the capacity of one’s imagination, really. There’s another one called ‘Butt Sports’, which I’ve never had the strength of character to visit. Or how about ‘Motley Garments Trading’? Another Sharjah one.

Incidentally, I was once surprised to be offered ‘Kak’ on a restaurant menu in Dubai, but even more surprised to find ‘Oscelot’ on a menu in Riyadh. I never did manage to work that one out.

The rich cornucopia of linguistic misunderstanding and misuse doesn’t stop here, of course. You also have the eternal debate centering around the vagaries of ‘Hinglish’. Is it a language in its own right? Who knows, but I think we need someone to do the needful and create a dictionary only. I was once stunned to be told by a gentleman making a delivery to me that he was waiting in my backside.

Of course, underpinning all this linguistic business is the limitless potential for cultural misunderstanding in the Gulf. Or cultural understanding. I once had a meeting with two Indian gentlemen and was getting nowhere, so I decided to grab the bull by the horns.

“You’ll perhaps forgive me for being blunt,” I said, exasperated. “But I’m English.”

“That’s OK, we’re used to it,” said one of them. “We’re Indian.”

Ouch.

Of course, this all means that an element of care is required when dealing with language. The shop owners above are presumably blissly unaware that they’re causing amusement, but they’re in good company. Take Toyota. Of all the tales of product names that went horribly wrong, my personal favourite is the Toyota MR2 sports car. It stands for ‘Mobile Recreator, 2-seater’ apparently, but the wonder of it is that it is pronounced ‘emerdeux’ in French. Which is not really the image that Toyota had in mind. I’m not sure how they solved that particular problem, but they probably called it ‘Pim Pom’ or something like that. The French seem to like that kind of product name.

And Pajero apparently means something awful in Spanish, which is why it’s called a Shogun in Europe (not sure if I believe that one), let alone Rolls Royce finding out that Silver Mist is not a good name for a car in Germany, where mist means ‘dung pile’. General Motors also fell foul of the name game with the Nova, which in Mexico means ‘Doesn’t go’.

The granddaddy of them all, of course, is Coca Cola, which was first translated into Mandarin Chinese as ‘Kekoukela’, which means ‘bite the wax tadpole’. It’s not bad advice, as advice goes, but wasn’t really guaranteed to boost sales…

These kinds of ‘clangers’ are all too easy to achieve when you’ve got a country that is host to the entire membership of the United Nations. You’ll occasionally be lucky enough to find them in the newspapers, as well. My personal favourite was the headline in Gulf News: “Saudis grill arrested activists”. I’ve always wanted to see that one illustrated.

So here’s a toast to linguistic misunderstandings. Long may they continue!