Pepsi spooked Chinese consumers when it didn't realize its "Come alive with Pepsi" slogan translated to "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead."
When McDonald's brought its Big Mac to France, it translated to the name "Gros Mec," which actually means "big pimp".
When Frank Perdue's chicken hit Spanish markets, its tagline got terribly mangled from "It takes a strong man to make a tender chicken" to "It takes an aroused man to make a chicken affectionate."
Coors' "Turn it loose!" tagline took on a whole new meaning in Spain, where it translated to "You will suffer from diarrhea."
When Clairol brought its "Mist Stick" curling iron to Germany, it failed to realize "Mist" is German slang for manure, resulting in crappy sales numbers for the product.
A Schweppes campaign went down the tubes when the company tried to sell Italian consumers "toilet water" instead of tonic water
This one reportedly didn't hurt sales: Hunt-Wesson introduced its baked beans in French Canada as "Gros Jos" without realizing that's slang for "big breasts"
KFC mistakenly translated its "finger-lickin' good" tagline to "eat your fingers off" in Chinese
