Duolingo, the language education brand, has released an ad to promote its ‘Museum of Wonky English’.
The pop-up event, situated in Harajuku, Tokyo, intends to celebrate mistranslations as opposed to shunning them in a bid to highlight the value of making mistakes when learning a new language.
As seen in the accompanying spot, the humorous phrases are displayed as art exhibitions. Each phrase, which at first seems mundane, takes on a completely different meaning as viewers analyse and marvel at the ‘art’ installations.
While one man ponders his existence as he reads the phrase ‘when coffee is all gone. It’s over’, another man gets everyone clapping with a t-shirt that says ‘crap your hands’.
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“Why do mistakes have such a bad rep? They’re the unsung language-learning heroes, and we wanted this campaign to settle the scores,” UltraSuperNew associate creative director, Andrés Aguilar, said.
“There’s a treasure trove of meanings you can only access when lost in translation, and that’s what we wanted people to experience in the Museum of Wonky English.”
The news comes months after the platform launched metaverse activations across Roblox and Decentraland to remind people to complete their language lessons.
