The Hamilton Lions Club is one of Bermuda’s best-known service organisations. It does sterling work. The Club was founded in 1917 and stresses community service, but not punctuation. Why the organisation took the name Lions is lost in the mists of time, but it probably had something to do with the strength of the lion, its powerful presence and leadership qualities. It’s unlikely that it was adopted because members of the Club planned to rip apart and eat lesser animals.

The metaphor is a little more apt for Detroit’s football team, the Lions. When they win, the headlines always say they mauled the opposition.

The symbol of the lion has been adopted by any number of countries and corporations. The lion is both Holland’s and Scotland’s national symbol. It is also Sweden’s and Tibet’s. Emperor Haile Selassie was known as the “Lion of Judah”. In heraldry, the lion symbolises bravery, strength and royalty. Along with a million others, there’s the British Rail lion, the Peugeot lion, the Chrysler lion, the Lion of Zion, Food Lion, Red Lion and honey, you can’t hide your lion eyes.

Symbolism is crucial to success in the corporate world. History is littered with examples of companies that didn’t quite get it right. Rolls Royce is one of the best. It arrogantly gave no thought to such things when it launched its Silver Mist model in Germany, where “Mist” means manure.

Another well-known cross-cultural corporate blunder also concerned a car, the Chevy Nova. It sold poorly in South America, until research (which might have been better carried out earlier) revealed that, in Spanish, “no va” means “won’t go”.

So many examples of how to get it wrong. When Pepsi translated its cutline, “Come alive with Pepsi”, it inadvertently ran a (brief) campaign based around people “reanimating their corpses out of the grave” with Pepsi. In Chinese, the Kentucky Fried Chicken slogan “finger-lickin’ good” came out as “eat your fingers off’, which I think is much better. The same thing happens in reverse: The Scandinavian vacuum manufacturer Electrolux tried to sell its goods in America, but didn't help itself with this slogan: “Nothing sucks like an Electrolux”.

Footwear manufacturer Nike has a television commercial for hiking shoes that was shot in Kenya using Samburu tribesmen. The camera closes in on one tribesman who speaks, in his native Maa tongue, as the Nike slogan, “Just do it”, appears on the screen. An anthropologist at the University of Cincinnati spotted that the Kenyan is really saying: “I don't want these. Give me big shoes”. Nike, who knew what was going on, said that they thought nobody in America would understand what the fellow was saying.

And finally, although it may be apocryphal, my favourite cross-cultural misunderstanding is about stevedores, apparently at an unnamed African port. They saw the supposedly international symbol for "fragile", which is a broken wine glass, on some boxes and assumed they must be full of broken glass. They threw the boxes into the sea.

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