Asus would been well-advised to check the brandname of its latest media centre PC system with a linguist before announcing the product to the world this week. According to Reg Hardware readers, Asus' Asteio brand means 'joke' in Greek.

Ah, the dangers of branding a consumer electronics product to a global audience...

A quick check with AltaVista's Babelfish confirms the fact. Enter 'joke' and activate the English-to-Greek translation yields:

asteio

which is, as near as makes no odds, Asus' media centre PC brandname.

Asus can at least console itself that it's not alone in making such a mistake. Nintendo's Wii sounds rather amusing in English, though at least it's not a real word here. We have a gut feeling 'zune' is a rude word in certain rare Hittite dialects, but since that's not Microsoft's target market, so the software giant will probably get away with it. ®

Thanks to readers Luke Kontogiannis and Dimitris Giakoumakis for the tip