Ha’aretz: “Political campaign buttons in Hebrew are a popular way to woo Jewish votes – but sometimes things get lost (or added) in translation. When Democrat John Kerry ran for president in 2004, his transliterated name appeared on thousands of buttons, stickers and coffee mugs. To the amusement of those familiar with Talmudic Hebrew, ‘keri’ in its phonetic spelling means a seminal discharge.”
And learning from the past:
Obama supporter Shahar Golan, of Rehovot, crafted a poster with the Hebrew translation of the slogan “Change we can believe in.”… Golan knows that translations can be tricky. On his blog, he elaborated on his choice of words. “Translating ‘Change we can believe in’ proved to be somewhat of a challenge,” he muses, “as the Hebrew word for ‘we can’ (nuchal) is the exact one for ‘crook’ (nochel).” Not wanting to repeat past mistakes, he added that “even a hint of such subliminal connections can be bad.”