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<\/p>\nAdd Naomi Osaka’s new company to the Marketing Blunders Hall of Fame.<\/p>\n
The tennis star announced earlier this week that she has partnered with Los Angeles Lakers forward LeBron James’s SpringHill to start a media company. She expessed the hope that it would produce TV shows, documentaries and branded content.<\/p>\n
The name of the new venture, Osaka said, was Hana Kuma, which she claimed means “flower bear” in Japanese.<\/p>\n
It didn’t take long for the Japanese-Haitian Osaka to discover it had another meaning in Swahili, where it translates to “Woman without a vagina.” An estimated 200 million people speak Swahili, the majority in East Africa.<\/p>\n
Dozens of Twitter users in Africa piled on, urging Osaka to reconsider the name, which many called offensive.<\/p>\n
Osaka’s venture isn’t the first company to make such a lost in translation error.<\/p>\n
One of the most famous was chicken producer Frank Perdue, whose slogan in English was, “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.” However, translated to Spanish, the phrase became, “It takes an aroused man to make a chicken affectionate.”<\/p>\n
Coors once put its slogan as “Turn it loose,” which means in Spanish, “Suffer from diarrhea.” And when Coca-Cola entered China, it was only discovered after thousands of signs were printed that the company name was rendered as Ke-kou-ke-la, which locals took to mean, “Bite the wax tadpole,” or “Female horse stuffed with wax.”<\/p>\n
In Taiwan, rival Pepsi fared no better. Its slogan, “Come alive with the Pepsi Generation” came out as “Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead.”<\/p>\n
So far, Oaska hasn’t publicly commented on the name gaffe. She did have a cryptic tweet the same day, as shown below.<\/p>\n
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