Note: The following is based on an actual advertising campaign meant for the mexican market. The actual “commercial” is made up, however only to emphasize how funny this would sound if you were a native Spanish (Mexico) speaker.

Fake Commercial:

Do you enjoy the finer things in the world?

First class life, first class pets, first class family?

When you fly, you fly first class.

When you fly first class with us, you fly naked.

As I warned, this is not an actual commercial, but when American Airlines (by many accounts although not 100% confirmed) translated their advertising campaign for the Mexican market, their new first class slogan, “Fly in Leather,” was translated into “Vuela en Cuero.”

“Vuela” translates into “fly”

“en” often into “in”

and “cuero” into leather.

The idiomatic expression “en cueros” essentially means “completely naked,” the person that delivered marketing translation must not have realized the danger in assuming a word-for-word translation always maintains the same meaning.

Stay tuned for more Corporate Blunders, and always have your ads handled by a professional translation agency with experience in marketing.