One case that I heard about is a high quality Chinese battery brand "白象“, when it is literally translated into English as "White Elephant", no one buys this brand of product. The reason is that "white elephant" in English means "something that is expensive but  useless". So cultural difference is one of the factors that we have to consider in translation. Othe factors might include ethnicity, customs, religion, etc. to name just a few. 

Hi,

I was told that Chevrolet experienced a sales problem in Spanish-speaking countries when it first named one of its models NOVA.  The words "no va" mean: "doesn't go" in Spanish.  The story may itself be manufactured (I don't know if they changed the name of the Nova in Spanish-speaking markets, for example).  But the story had widespread circulation in popular culture, and the example works for your query!

Most of the above answers have already said what could happen if a concept is mistranslated. Let me, however, add to the examples from South Asian Muslim civilizations as these have not been mentioned. The first  six examples are from Pakistani English and are also used in Urdu and other Pakistani languages (for details see my book Pakistani English 1990).

1. In Pakistan 'Sir' is used not only as a deferential or polite form of address but in place of a title. Thus, a person called Sir Tariq has not been knighted by the Queen of England but is simply placed above the person using this apparent title in authority.

2. University students are often called 'bachhe' in Urdu which is translated as children. This is often misleading in texts where young adults are mistaken for pre-pubescent children.

3. A 'colony' means a housing estate in Pakistani English.

4. the word chips is used for crisps as well as potato chips.

5. A shopper is a plastic bag.

6. The word teachers is used for school, college and university teachers so that academics gets translated as 'academicians' with no real understanding if what it means in world English.

One major misunderstanding which occurs in the translation of Urdu classical poetry is the word for the  beloved. In Urdu it is mashuq (from Arabic one who is loved) but the pronoun used is masculine and 'he' is described having down on the cheeks (khat) which is taken as a sign of beauty. In short, the beloved is often portrayed conventionally as a beautiful adolescent boy (an ephebus).  To consider this phenomenon as homosexuality as understood in the modern West is misleading. However, since the related terms are translated in the modern vocabulary of being 'gay', one finds that the classical poets of Persian and Urdu are categorized as being 'gay' in some unsophisticated Western writings. I have used the word ephebophilia for this phenomenon rather than the modern term 'gay' which is misleading in this context.

The beloved is often described as a woman too. Her breasts and other feminine attributes may be described. However,  the pronouns and verb endings are still masculine. This too is a source of confusion for translators. That it is a convention goes unnoticed. In such complicated cases one needs an explanation and any attempt at mere translation will be inadequate and misleading.

Since the Spanish-English translation issues came up, I would like to mention that when I was editing a book some years ago in Spanish, there was a sentence in English which said: Causality is at the heart of being. One translator translated it as: La casualidad esta en en corazon del ser. Now if you look closely, causality was translated as casualidad which is actually a 'false neighbour word' which means 'accidental'. It should have been "causalidad" which means the exact opposite of casualidad. So, not only can the meaning change, it can go to the extreme other end. 

I recall having heard from a great translation scholar (Gayatri Spivak) in a seminar that after Marx's death, Engels had misinterpreted a large number of Marx's terms (confusion with words) which in turn where translated with serious misinterpretations into English and French and this huge conceptual mess was bundled together and presented as 'Marx-Engels literature". Translation could well be blamed for the collapse of an ideology.

The question assumes that there is such a thing as a proper translation. Speaking of Spivak, an interrogation of the assumption might lead to an exploration of property, propriety, appropriateness, etc.  Every translation is both a failure and an opportunity. Etymology of proper: one's own.  Propre in French is clean.

Check Wierzbicka's Imprisoned in English.  Also see Experience, Evidence, and Sense: The Hidden Cultural Legacy of English and English: Meaning and culture (2006)  Each looks at aspects of the same issue in the context of the history and current hegemony of English as a global lingua franca.

Dear Vivanco,

The issue of equivalence is not always guaranteed by resorting to textual features. Pym has rightly observed that there are often instances that cannot be decided by analyzing the text itself, rather the translator should exploit his/her own knowledge of the world to decipher the desirable TL or SL terms enjoying the same semantic balance. This reminds us of Larson-Freeman's suggestion of idiomatic translation where the message should be rendered with such a fluency that the recipients do not get a feeling of translation.

Best regards,

R, Biria