Adventures In Chinese Vehicle Branding, 1988: CHEDU Van
During the late 1980s, my future wife spent several years teaching English in northern China. Back then, many Chinese manufacturers felt that showing off Western-language brand labels indicated worldliness, and so this Chengdu passenger van got a “CD” grille ornament and some somewhat garbled lettering above.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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My favorite: Years ago I purchased a set of cheap kitchen knives that had the admonishment "Do Not Use On Children" printed in the instructions. Wish I hadn't lost them in a move.
It is equally amusing when American companies do the same... As a Chinese speaker, I got a chuckle out of Dodge's official Chinese webpage. While not entirely garbled, there are enough grammatical errors and awkwardly phrased sentences to make one question Chrysler's marketing department (or the translators they hired): http://www.dodge.cn/home/index.html Not to be too harsh on Chrysler, I include for your reading pleasure Chery's English website, which is equally awkward: http://www.cheryinternational.com/company.php The sad thing is that both of these are rather large manufacturers, who clearly could have afforded to hire professional writers for the subject languages.
The original example still must be the Chevrolet Nova, which in spanish is of course "No go".
MZR, my daily driver has a Blaupunkt Indianapolis, a sub 100$ radio.