If you use Google Translate to translate “Got milk?” into Spanish, and burrow into the ‘alternate translations’ it offers you, one of the choices is “bigote de leche”, which means “milk moustache”. I’m leaving it as an exercise for the reader to figure out how it arrived at that translation.
Of course, this is better than the tagline they went with in Spanish speaking countries: “¿Tiene leche?” which sounds plausible enough to a non-native speaker, but which carries maternal associations, something along the lines of “Are you lactating?“
30 October 2011 at 12:15 pm
A mutual friend of ours speaks Spanish and teaches English… I hope you can work this into a lecture and I'll see if it makes it way into a classroom!
2 November 2011 at 3:02 pm
Actually, given the ad campaign the Milk Advisory Board has been using, "milk moustache" isn't such a terrible translation.
See: https://www.google.com/search?q="got+milk"+ad+campaign&tbm=isch