There has been a fair amount of feedback since I first posted the article, and I feel that some clarifications need to be made.
Pajero is a particularly bad choice for a product name because it does not just ‘happen to mean something in some language’, but instead the name is in fact intended to be Spanish and was chosen in ignorance of what it really means in this language. This separates it from, for instance, the case of Mensa, the society for high-IQ people, whose name can mean ‘stupid girl’ in Mexican slang. The difference is in that the Latin term MENSA predates Mexican slang by centuries, the name is not intended to be Spanish, and educated Spanish speakers understand it as being the name of the well-known organisation first and foremost, and a slang term second; indeed, the slang meaning is only known to a minority of Spanish-speakers.
Pajero is also not in the same category as such famous cases as the Chevrolet Nova — which sounds like the Spanish phrase no va i.e. ‘it doesn't go’ — for the simple reason that the Nova story is an urban legend. The name of the car is stressed on the first syllable (‘nóva’) whereas the phrase is stressed on the second syllable (‘nová’). This is a huge difference in Spanish, and enough to clearly differentiate the two, just like ‘desert’ and ‘dessert’ in English. The similarity is enough to allow a punster to poke fun, but not enough to make the name at all ridiculous. The Nova was never renamed or withdrawn from the Latin American market; it in fact sold well. Nevertheless, I have seen the Nova story on numerous web-sites which, like this one, are selling translation services. The lesson is supposed to be that you need professional linguists who will do their research and make sure your business does not suffer embarrassment. Ironically in so doing, they show themselves up by repeating urban myths they have received in junk e-mails and disguising them as professional insights.
The same goes for claims that Coca-Cola accidentally gave their drink a Chinese name that literally meant ‘Bite the Wax Tadpole’, or that Pepsi’s translation of the slogan ‘Come alive! You’re in the Pepsi Generation’ into Thai actually meant something like ‘Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back From the Dead’. Hoaxes and legends.
As regards the pronunciation of pajero, I gave it as approximately ‘pah-HAIR-oh’. The linguists among you may prefer the standard International Phonetic Alphabet transcription, which is /pa'xero/. This /x/ represents the guttural sound of the Spanish j, or the ch in Scottish or German words such loch or Bach. In South American dialects of Spanish, this is weakened to something like the English h sound.