Greeks says Asus media centre PC is a joke - literally

[MarkG]

Greeks says Asus media centre PC is a joke - literally

By Tony Smith
Published Friday 3rd November 2006 12:25 GMT

Asus would been well-advised to check the brandname of its latest media centre PC system (http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/11..._media_centre/) with a linguist before announcing the product to the world this week. According to Reg Hardware readers, Asus' Asteio brand means 'joke' in Greek.



Ah, the dangers of branding a consumer electronics product to a global audience...

A quick check with AltaVista's Babelfish confirms the fact. Enter 'joke' and activate the English-to-Greek translation yields:

asteio

which is, as near as makes no odds, Asus' media centre PC brandname.

Asus can at least console itself that it's not alone in making such a mistake. Nintendo's Wii sounds rather amusing in English, though at least it's not a real word here. We have a gut feeling 'zune' is a rude word in certain rare Hittite dialects, but since that's not Microsoft's target market, so the software giant will probably get away with it. ®

Thanks to readers Luke Kontogiannis and Dimitris Giakoumakis for the tip

[Combat Ingrid]

Reminds me of the Honda Fitta car:

Car maker Honda introduced their new car "Fitta" in the Nordic countries during 2001, only to find out that "fitta" is an old word, currently used in vulgar language to refer to a woman's genitals in Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. It was renamed to "Honda Jazz" for the Nordic market. According to newspaper articles, Japanese ads said that "[Fitta] is small on the outside, but large on the inside".

http://www.i18nguy.com/translations.html

[Asher]

If the Greek market was in any way significant, I'm sure Asus would have known or would have even cared.

[Lul Thyme]

The 'nova' car meant no-go in portugueuse or spanish.
Short words will always mean something in some languages.
Its not that big a deal.

[MRT144]

fitta small on the outside big on the inside

[Pekka]

Honda had Fitta? aheaehaheaheaeahehahaeahe omg that's .. people are going to get fired!

[Fake Boris]

Originally posted by Combat Ingrid
Reminds me of the Honda Fitta car:

[Fake Boris]

There's another nice one: EtronTech, a company that manufactures ram chips. 'Etron' is French for piece of ****.

[Lord Avalon]

Remember the Rolls Royce Silver Mist? Had to be renamed for the German market, because Mist means "manure."

[Nostromo]

I know, I mentioned it before, bu Zune, Microsoft's new MP3 player, sounds a lot like the québecois "zoune", which means "dick"

[Az]

interesting.

Zune is also very similar to Ziyun - hebrew for ****ing someone/something (not necessarily literally )


The Mitsubishi Pajero also comes to mind.

[MarkG]

Originally posted by Asher
If the Greek market was in any way significant, I'm sure Asus would have known or would have even cared.

news alert! average asher response time to a markg thread drops after asher taking over a whole hour to respond to the latest thread by markg. scientists explain the phainomenon on our 18:00 news!

[Unspeakable Horror]

Originally posted by Az

The Mitsubishi Pajero also comes to mind.

[Straybow]

pajAro means bird, but I'm not sure what pajEro means...

care to enlighten us?

[Nostromo]

According to wikipedia, it means w@nker in spanish