Happy Friday, dear readers! Today's post is short and sweet. This is an ad that Judy picked up at a restaurant in Recife, Brazil, during her stay in the gorgeous country for the fantastic Proz.com conference.
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| Very, very close. |
The ad is largely in Portuguese, with one memorable line in English. We hear from our Brazilian friends that advertisers like to use English phrases and words, such as a pizzeria that calls itself "steakhouse" in English, even though it is clearly a pizzeria. English is considered quite cool, which is fantastic, but as we can see, the results are not always great. Perhaps advertisers should rely on some of the fantastic English/Portuguese translators Judy met at the conference.
Surely Walber Marinho is a fabulous hairdresser, and he also uses that English-language term in his ad, but now he should rely on other professionals for his language needs. It really is amazing that one small letter (missing, in this case) makes all the difference.
To see a larger version, simply click on the image.
With that: have a great weekend.
5 comments:
It also shouldn't say ''her hair'' but ''your hair'' ! :)
Actually, unless I am mistaken there is more than one error in this tagline. "Seus" is the third person possessive pronoun, which is used as a formal address to the reader. So it should be "You hair", not "Her". Maybe a Portuguese speaker could confirm this?
@Diana: We agree that this sounds quite awkward (her hair), but we thought it was a clever, if slightly off, attempt at emphasizing that this hairdresser specializes in women's hair (although it's not very idiomatic). We've seen similar approaches here in the US ("everything for her closet"), so we would say it's a creative marketing twist. However, we do prefer "you hair" as well, but then it's not clear that it's all about women. Copywriting is tough, isn't it? Of course, if the Portuguese says "your" hair, then the English should reflect that, but we don't have any insight into the Portuguese. Thanks for reading and for commenting!
@TAM: Good point -- see above. We can't speak for the Portuguese, so we do indeed need one of our fabulous Portuguese speakers to help us out here! :) Thanks for reading and happy Friday!
Judy!! Portuguese speaker here! :)
@Diana: Ah, duh! I am a dork -- I thought you were saying it wasn't idiomatic in English without having read the Portuguese. I hadn't even read the Portuguese (as I don't speak it, although I understand quite a a bit), as I thought it was just an original English language tagline. I get it now. :) Thanks so much for clearing this up. I get today's stupidity award. Thanks so much for your insight!
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