Pocket Jokes / Recent Jokes

Below are fine examples of what happens when marketing translations fail to reach a foreign country in an understandable way. Coors put its slogan, "Turn it loose," into Spanish, where it was read as "Suffer from diarrhea." Clairol introduced the "Mist Stick," a curling iron, into German only to find out that "mist" is slang for manure. Not too many people had use for the "manure stick". Scandinavian vacuum manufacturer Electrolux used the following in an American campaign: Nothing sucks like an Electrolux. The American slogan for Salem cigarettes, "Salem-Feeling Free", was translated into the Japanese market as "When smoking Salem, you will feel so refreshed that your mind seems to be free and empty." When Gerber started selling baby food in Africa, they used the same packaging as in the US, with the beautiful baby on the label. Later they learned that in Africa, companies routinely put pictures on the label of more...

A teacher was having trouble teaching arithmetic to one little boy. So she said, "if you reached in your right pocket and found a nickel, and you reached in your left pocket and found another one, what would you have?"

"Somebody else's pants."

I took some clients out to dinner last week, and I noticed a spoon in the shirt pocket of our waiter as he handed us the menus. It seemed a little odd, but I dismissed it as a random thing. Until our busboy came with water and tableware; he too, sported a spoon in his breast pocket. I looked around the room, and all the waiters and busboys had spoons in their pockets. When our waiter returned to take our order, I just had to ask, "Why the spoons?"

"Well," he explained, "our parent company recently hired some Andersen Consulting efficiency experts to review all our procedures, and after months of statistical analyses, they concluded that our patrons drop spoons on the floor 73% more often than any other utensil, at a frequency of 3 spoons per hour per workstation. By preparing our workers for this contingency in advance, we can cut our trips to the kitchen down and save time... nearly 1.5 extra man-hours per shift." Just as he concluded, a more...

Cracking an international market is a goal of most growing corporations. It shouldn't be that hard, yet even the big multi-nationals run into trouble because of language and cultural differences. For example, observe the following examples below.

The name Coca-Cola in China was first rendered as Ke-kou-ke-la. Unfortunately, the Coke company did not discover until after thousands of signs had been printed that the phrase means "bite the wax tadpole" or "female horse stuffed with wax" depending on the dialect. Coke then researched 40, 000 Chinese characters and found a close phonetic equivalent, "ko-kou-ko-le," which can be loosely translated as "happiness in the mouth."

In Taiwan, the translation of the Pepsi slogan "Come alive with the Pepsi Generation" came out as "Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead."

Also in Chinese, the Kentucky Fried Chicken slogan "finger-lickin' more...

Two men were riding on a train. One of them had a bottle in his coat pocket, and the other one wanted it. Finally the train went through a dark tunnel and the man was able to take the bottle out and drink up all the "whisky" inside of it. Then he put it back into the other man's pocket. When the train came out of the tunnel, the man who owned the bottle took it out of his pocket, opened it up, and spit into it.

Here's an easy game to play. Here's an easy thing to say:

If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,

And the bus is interrupted as a very last resort,

And the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort,

Then the socket packet pocket has an error to report!

If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash,

And the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash,

And your data is corrupted' cause the index doesn't hash,

Then your situation's hopeless, and your system's gonna crash!

You can't say this?

What a shame sir!

We'll find you

Another game sir:

If the label on the cable on the table at your house,

Says the network is connected to the button on your mouse,

But your packets want to tunnel on another protocol,

That's repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall,

And your more...

whats the difference between a pervert and a pick pocket?
One watches snatches the other snatches watches.