English FAIL Blog

Actually, Severin is a Swedish/Scandinavian brand, and “back” means “bake” in Swedish. No fail there. The slogan is in Swedish. Automatic happens to be the same in both languages.

I´m sorry, but you´re completely wrong. The word “back” doesn´t mean “bake” in Swedish, the correct word for “bake” would be “baka”.

If the slogan would have been in Swedish it would have read “Automatisk bakmaskin” or just “Bakmaskin”.

It meant that the machine has an automatic pop up tray at the end of the baking cycle. In that case it’s not even an English fail, but a Swedish/Swenglish fail.

Wow…stop trying so hard to make this not a fail…

If it’s Swedish, that’s one cheap breadmaker: 38 Swedish kronor is like 6 bucks! Price fail? (Even if that’s Euros, it’s still a cheap breadmaker… which probably explains the box.)

That’s dutch!

The price tag says “pöytägrilli” which is Finnish. (They use euros, €38 would be reasonable price for this.)

The Severin Elektrogeräte GmbH is an international household appliances company from Sundern, Germany. “Back” simply means “to bake” in German. Well strictly speaking it’s “backen”, “back” is some kind of stand-alone prefix word here. “Back” is to “backen” what “BAK-” would be to “BAKing” in English. Think “BAK-O-MATIC”.

I’m certain this box is saying exactly what a highly-paid professional marketing department wanted it to say. It should say “automatik-back” in proper German, but that doesn’t sound cool enough. It’s perfectly ‘normal’ for German companies to mix English words into their product descriptions in an attempt to look more impressive.

Sorry, this really isn’t failed English. Marketing-speak doesn’t even TRY to pass off as coherent language. It’s more of “failed German”, if anything.

And how it is failed German!

In proper Germand it would have been “Automatische Backmaschine” or “Automatisches Backgerät”. Automatic Back? Not even a really good marketing campaign could pull that off.

I thought “bäcken” had an umlaut…? Eh, it’s been a few years since I took German.

If “baka” is proper Swedish for “bake”, though, that makes me laugh. “Baka” is Japanese for “idiot” and is a commonly-used mild insult. I wouldn’t call that a fail, though, since it’s not an intentional or unintentional slip-up.

@Adhara: you’re probably not thinking of the verb backen but of Bäcker (baker) or Bäckerei (bakery)

Oh, let me clarify that by ‘proper’ I meant by the, um, ’standards’ of marketing. That is, just German enough so that you could at least recognize which language it’s in.

“Backautomat”. It could be as simple as that. But how would THAT look on a box?

Good job for taking the fun out of that one, everybody.

Strange, however, that the label says “pöytägrilli” - that means something along the lines on “tabletop grill”, but that’s clearly a breadmaker.