Meryl's Notes Blog

Last week, I saw a bakery-style truck with “Bimbo” emblazoned on it. There was nothing adult or insulting about the name as the Mexico-based company sells baked goods. I took three years of Spanish in high school and couldn’t recall if bimbo meant something. The online dictionaries didn’t produce a translation, so I can only assume it’s a proper name with no meaning.

According to the company’s web site, “For years, we’ve been delivering a wide range of high-quality baked goods to consumers throughout the US…” I’m curious as to why the company didn’t rebrand it for its U.S. operations.

Couldn’t find a good resource discussing translation of brands, but here’s fun resource on marketing translation mistakes. Like the site says, “Also, take these with a grain of salt…They may be contrived and not true, or if true, unrecognizably transformed.”

Maybe with the exception of cuss words, we don’t need to be so concerned with the product names as we used to be. Or should we?