The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

Cedric Manara has a few posts (one in English, and one in French) about domain names that don't quite hold up so well either when pronounced or in other languages.

In the latter he refers to me, because I recounted to him the sad tale of a friend of mine who chose for his professional domain name a combination of his last name and the name of his craft. Which works perfectly well in English, but... um... potentially undermines the positive impression he would like to make in another prominent language...

(Domain name withheld because I really like my friend and I don't want to expose him to teasing. However, if he wants the publicity, I'd be happy to link to him. He really is very good at his profession, and a nice guy to boot...)

Of course, it's not just my friend who has this kind of problem. All sorts of enterprises, large and small, that wish to do business across borders need to be sensitive to these linguistic and cultural nuances. The Internet exacerbates the situation because it makes it so easy to have an international presence, but these problems have arisen before. I remember hearing once the potentially apocryphal tale about how Chevrolet couldn't figure out why sales for the Chevy Nova were so poor in Mexico - until someone pointed out that few people would want a car that was called "It Doesn't Go."