[disconnected]

That is more difficult than it may appear.

Sometimes you need people that are pretty immersed in a culture to know about these things and avoid shooting yourself in the foot.

Hyundai, for example, almost made the mistake of releasing a vehicle named Kona in Portugal.

Kona is a pretty harmless word in most contexts, but "kona" reads exactly like "cona" for a Portuguese speaker, and "cona" is slag for "vagina".

Oops.

They renamed it Kauai for the Portuguese market, IIRC.

[maccard]

In the general case, yes. But googling for Munt will tell you that it's not really a suitable name for a product.

[klmr]

There’s also the Ford Pinto. In Brazilian (!) Portuguese, “pinto” is close to the male equivalent of “cona”.