un army de uno

There appears to be a sort of Mexican-Day festival going on on my block right now. There's a live band on a stage, and a Mexican-flag stand literally right next to my front door. As always, there's an Army recruiting station.

I always find it funny when slogans get translated differently -- in McD's the other day, I saw a dual-language sign that said "100% Taste!" in English, but in Spanish it said something like ¡Prueba nuestro sabor incomparable! Maybe that "hundred-percent" thing just isn't tossed around so casually in other languages. I wonder if you could walk into a classroom in, say, Malaysia, and ask people to give you "110%" and they'd either look at you like you couldn't do math, or else consider it a completely novel motivational phrase.

So, the Army's slogan "An Army of One" is translated into Spanish simply as "Yo soy el Army." Now, obviously "an army of one" is made up of four simple words that certainly exist in Spanish; however, together, they must just not make any sense, at least according to advertising executives.