Apple Inc CEO Tim Cook discusses the iPhone 7 during an Apple media event in San Francisco, California, U.S. September 7, 2016. Reuters/Beck Diefenbach     TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY      - RTX2OK2P

According to an article on Quartz.   Apple is known for its hashtags and slogans, for example, iPhone 4 had ‘This changes everything. Again,’ iPhone 6 had ‘Bigger than bigger’ – but the latest slogan; ‘This is 7’ has given our Chinese folks the wrong impression. Check out the different translations.

apple-iphone-7-slogan-collage

  Here is what they mean when translated into English:

China: 7, is here.
Taiwan: Exactly is 7.
Hong Kong: This, is exactly iPhone 7.

This is 7” (這是7) sounds a bit like a nonsense in Chinese. The version in China changes the word order to make it less colloquial, while the Taiwan version adds “就,” which means exactly or precisely, to, er, make it sound more affirmative. The Hong Kong slogan, meanwhile, seems to be wordy, failing to capture the simplicity of the original English version.

Here’s why they’re different: Hong Kongers speak Cantonese, while mainlanders and Taiwanese speak Mandarin. Speakers of the two biggest dialects of the Chinese language can find each other impossible to understand and even use different written characters.

And in Cantonese, “seven,” or 柒, is pronounced tsat, and is also slang for “penis.” The word isn’t particularly offensive. Instead, it is often used to describe a hilarious person or thing, or mock someone gently. Let’s say a friend slipped in public, or got a goofy haircut: you can say to him in Cantonese “You are so seven,” without hurting his feelings too much.

View image on Twitter

“This is 7” – honestly, it doesn’t sound that great when say it in Cantonese..

Apple could have learned a lesson from Samsung. After the Korean company released the Galaxy Note 7 smartphone earlier this year, Hong Kongers joked that “Note 7” sounds like “a stick of penis” in Cantonese.

Tagged With: