Sometimes the name just gets lost in translation

It goes without saying that there are more serious consequences of the Zika virus sweeping through South America in particular – but there’s a car manufacturer in India with reason to wish it was called something else.

And while it may pale into insignificance compares to the deformities suffered by new born babies after their pregnant mothers were bitten by the infected mosquitoes, our Indian friends now have a whole range of entry-range hatchback cars that a bomb couldn’t shirt.

Because Tata Motors’ Zica car – originally chosen as a clever abbreviation of zippy car – is now synonymous with a deadly virus. And who wants to spend their hard-earned cash on one of those?

Then again when we choose these names, we cannot see into the future – just ask those companies who were once proud of their Isis branding.

Isis chocolates is now Libeert; Isis, the US mobile wallet platform, became Softcard – even Isis, the dog in Downton Abbey, had to get sick and die.

The Golden Circle drinks company in New Zealand would have found it equally difficult to shift its popular product once SARS came to be better known as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.

And as for Ayds candy in the US? The bottom sort of fell out of that market too.

Sometimes you have to think through all eventualities – like the people in Tralee RTC when they all became IT’s. GMIT is fine, but ITT is a much better option for our friends in Kerry to avoid getting an abbreviation they didn’t really want.

They could have offered advice to the publishers of a set of children’s books –because while Winnie the Pooh has been a favourite with children through the generations, if you’re launching a range of activity books you need to use his full name.

Cooking with Pooh and Clay Modelling with Pooh doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

But sometimes too it just get lost in translation – Pee Cola from Ghana, China’s Only Puke crisps and its wonderfully bizarre pillow-soft ShitBegone toilet paper, the Spunk range of Indian sportswear, Zit ice cream, the Indian pillow range known as Nightmare or that well-known South Korean thirst-quencher Coolpis.

Mazda’s Laputa model didn’t take off in Spain; puta is a slang word for prostitute. And it’s just as well that Cambodia’s Orina Spring Water didn’t attempt to crack that same Spanish market – orina means urine on the Iberian Peninsula.

Indeed Spain is something of a graveyard for international brand names – Mitsubishi changed the name on its Pajero for that market alone because it loosely translates as w**ker. So it became the Mitsubishi Monteros for one country alone.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.