Continental can’t speak Chinese

continental head cold.jpg

Steven Schwankert was passing through Newark’s Liberty International Airport where he took the photo on the left, an ad for Continental Airlines. The ad shows different translations for “my head is cold”, linked to different Continental destinations. This apparently proves that Continental can speak any language and is hip and international.

But take a closer look at the Chinese translation for Beijing:

beijing_cold_hair.jpg

Aside from the fact that Beijing is represented by the type of conical hat no one has ever worn in northern China, the translation is rendered as “My hair is cold”!

As Schwankert puts it, “you would have thought that by now, Continental would have made enough from its Newark-Beijing route to get someone in its Beijing office to do a proper translation.”

UPDATE: Perhaps they can speak Chinese after all; a commenter points out that the phrase can be read as wo de tou faleng rather than wo de toufa leng, which is perhaps not a common usage, but is not incorrect…

Also worth noting: the first result returned on a Baidu search for the string ‘tou fa leng’ is this: How to use Chinese medicine to cure a cold penis head.

This entry was posted in Advertising and Marketing and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.