A funny story

Today I have a funny story I would like to share. I receive this one as forwarded mail and it made me smile.

A salesman of Coca-Cola returned from his assignment to China.   A friend asked,  "Why weren't you successful with the Chinese?"

The salesman explained, "When I got posted, I was very confident that I would make a good sales pitch. But I had a problem. I didn't know how to speak Mandarin. So I planned to convey the message through three posters. 

   

First poster: A man lying in the hot desert sand totally exhausted and fainting.
Second poster: The man is drinking Coca-Cola.
Third poster: Our man is now totally refreshed.

And then these posters were pasted all over the place.   "Terrific! That should have worked!" said the friend.   "The hell it should have!" said the salesman.
"No one told me they read from right to left!"         

Ha Ha Ha. I hope this story wasn't real. If you read from right to left, it can be interpreted that drinking Coke makes you eshausted. So no Chinese would drink Coke anymore. This story teaches us that cross cultural communication is very important. If you want to communicate with someone outside your culture, you have to learn and study their cultures very well, otherwise you might make some mistakes like this salesman in the story. This can apply to translation as well because translation is a form of communication. This is why translators have to understand the cultures of  their source languages and their readers. Otherwise, they might mistranslate the texts and make the readers misunderstant the text.