BMW

BMW in Chinese is “宝马” (bao-ma). It originally means “precious horse” but due to BMW’s popularity, every time you input the characters “宝马” into an AI translator it translates to “BMW”.

For example '招财进宝马到成功' should read “Wishing you fortune and success” but in the clumsy hands of an AI translator it is interpreted as the nonsensical sentence “Lucky money into BMW to success”.

Real Good was asked to create a campaign that visually represented these translation errors.

The campaign showcases a progression of increasingly absurd AI translation errors through a series of vignettes. 

For instance, "一匹宝⻢在奔跑" which should translate to "A precious horse is running", is wrongly translated by the AI as "A BMW is running"

“祝你宝⻢雕⻋香满路” is a line from a classic poem by Xin Qiji. 

However, when input into an AI translator the english output was “I wish you a BMW carving car”.

In order to contrast the uncanny robotic tone of the AI translation errors, we chose to create a home-made feel for the scenes we filmed. We relied primarily on practical, in-camera effects. This approach embraced human error and lead to strange and funny moments that would have been impossible to plan for.