Localisation Faux Pas (Archive)

Occasionally a company invests considerable time and money to ensure not only that their products are appropriately named for each of the foreign markets they compete in, but that the company name itself is free from negative connotations in any marketplace. One of the most well known examples of this is the series of name changes that Standard Oil have undertaken in their many years of business. 

Having concluded that Standard Oil sounded too much like a U.S. company, they changed the corporate name to "Esso." Esso, however, has some significant negative connotations in the Japanese market: it translates phonetically as "stalled car." 

Using modern technology, Esso spent great amounts of money studying the language and slang of dozens of languages, enabling them to feed the data into a computer, which then generated inoffensive non-word names suitable for an international corporation. This list of words was then given to numerous linguists who ascertained that "Exxon" was the best of the choices. Ironically, Exxon is similar to an obscure obscenity in Aluet Eskimo.