Giving a whole new meaning (er, a whole old meaning) to "nova"; took me a sec to realize that was the subreddit for Northern Virginia. :P
No, "nova" just means "new." Nova Scotia translates to New Scotland.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/04/14/supr...
Double entendre, subtext send similar are a large part of marketing. It's often used in the vein of "sex sells," but can have other uses.
I got the information from a piece about translation fails in international branding campaigns. It wouldn't surprise me if the article has inaccuracies. It's hard enough for someone to be fluent enough in two languages and knowledgeable enough about two cultures to effectively fact check such a piece and the piece covered multiple incidences involving various languages and cultures, not just Spanish-English.
IIRC, here are a few other examples from the article:
Coca cola apparently originally was written in Chinese such that it meant "bite the frog." Sales improved after they modified it such that it meant "happiness in the mouth."
The Spanish word for "embarrassed" doesn't get used to mean embarrassed. It gets used to mean pregnant. Some campaign for some trivial thing like toothpaste or breathe mints had a slogan about use their product "and never be embarrassed again" which weirdly got translated to "and never get pregnant again."
Some toothpaste that bragged about it's whitening ability bombed when they tried to market it in a culture where people dyed their teeth some dark color.
Yes, the Nova story is very common in that context, but everyone who's actually done the research has found that the Nova actually sold decently well. The story probably originates with some English speaker who knew some Spanish seeing the car's name, read it as "no va", and assumed that "of course that would sell poorly" and using that as an example of marketing failure, which everyone copied without fact-checking.
Note that Spanish does have a word "nova", which means exactly the same thing it does in English (a stellar birth), and could be used as a marketing name in Spanish-speaking countries with much the same connotations as you could find in English. After all, Pemex has a brand of fuel that's called "Nova," which should instantly debunk the story.
For those who are in the know, speak Spanish, etc.
I did qualify my remark to indicate as clearly as I could that I lack such credentials and there's room for error here when I led with "From what I've read."
There are good ways to add such knowledge to the discussion. Raking someone over the coals for trying to join in with people playing with language for light-hearted fun is probably not one of them.
I've always been confused by that, as I couldn't get Coca-Cola to be anywhere phonetically close to 蛙 ("wa"), which would be the character for frog. Had to look it up — https://service.goodcharacters.com/blog/blog.php?id=225 has it as being 蝌蝌啃蠟, which is mostly nonsense, but if I had to translate it, it would be closer to "tadpole nibbles wax". Or possibly, "ke ke brand nibbling wax", assuming "nibbling wax" is a thing. It certainly doesn't sound like a drink.