In the 1928 U.S. presidential campaign, candidate Herbert Hoover promised “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.” Later this year PC users in Latvia can look forward to a chicken on every disk when Microsoft releases Vista, which in Latvian means”frumpy woman” or “chicken.”

Meanwhile, closer to home, Microsoft media users in Québec raised their eyebrows last summer when the company announced its new Zune media player. It seems that “Zune” sounds like a dated, cutesy slang term for genitalia in la belle Province. Microsoft dismissed the homophony as a non-issue and said that the association of the slang term with its music player was “quite a stretch.” Taking a different — and more sensible — tack, organizers of the BITcon conference in Montreal relented to francophone pleas to change the name, its two syllables recalling more vulgar terms.

The bottom line: We assume that Microsoft decided that giving 1.3 million Latvians a good laugh or unduly offending a few million Qu�becois wasn’t worth sacrificing otherwise good product names. Whenever you take a product or brand name beyond your own language, get help on linguistic, cultural, economic, and legal issues. Companies often turn to their account representative at their lead language service provider, who in turn will ask around in their various offices whether zune or vista will bother anyone. Some firms will turn to specialists like Landor or Strategic Name Development, while the biggest corporations will rely on their agencies of record to undertake the search for offensive words — and those AORs will typically call language service providers or those specialists to do the asking. Whichever approach you choose, don’t take the chance of being the subject of blog entries and sophomoric twitters for something so easily avoided.