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What’s even more interesting are the countries where “apples-oranges” holds true: it translates translates in Germany, China, Greece, Russia, etc.

And then look at the contrasts between cultures: Apple/Orange works in China but not Japan, Finland but not Denmark, Greece but not Turkey.

And what the heck is up with the U.K. edition? And Slovenia? My goodness.

I got Japan and China backwards.

I’m not sure that the the “apple-orange” image on the cover necessarily means that the concept holds true in the country. In Russia we’d say “comparing flies and cutlets” (weird, I know).

It might actually illustrate the “hidden side of everything” part of the title. Like the orange is sort of “hidden” inside the apple.

Here in Germany, we compare apples to pears, not to oranges.

In Slovakia, we compare apples to pears as well, although there won’t ever be any Freakonomics edition :-)

Same in Holland (apples to pears). I wonder if they gave it much thought.

I’m not sure they intended the original cover to refer to comparing apples and oranges – it could just be a way to illustrate “the hidden side of everything” like Eugene said. Like the bizarre light-bulb-inside-a-pear image on the Estonian cover, or the Banana Corn on Norway’s.

I suspect the main issue is that the apples/oranges image is pretty subtle – you’d have to be a regular consumer of both apples and oranges to notice anything “freaky” about it.

What’s strange is the completely different message some of the covers send – Hungary’s three-handled scissors don’t show “the hidden side” of anything, just something completely broken. And Denmark’s green egg reminds me more of a rotten egg than Dr. Seuss.

And what the heck happened in France? And is that UK Paperback cover some kind of joke?

“And what the heck happened in France?”—Same what happens there all the time – it just neeeeeds to be different from what the English or American do.

The Turkish cover manages to inhabit its own universe of thinking, though…

I agree with Michael, I always thought the cover was a reference to the hidden side of everything rather than comparing apples to oranges. What about Freakonomics is even about that phrase?

There is a straightforward explanation to the Estonian bizarre-bulb-and-pear:

In Estonian language, we use the same word, “pirn”, for both a light bulb and a pear. :)

Serbians compare ‘grandmothers and frogs’ and the Romanians compare ‘grandmother and machine guns’! Both extremely weird!

Me gusta “Lokonomia”

There’s a wonderful chart of how different cultures express incomprehensible languages (what English-speakers say “it’s all Greek to me”, but what do Greeks say? It’s surprising:

http://daisyjoe.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/greek-to-me-diagram/

well, not quite sure about what ‘comparing apples and oranges’ means in English, but I could make some explain here to the chinese simplified version cover, as it refers a saying in Chinese: A wolf wears a lamb suit. This saying means that those who seems innocent of the outside but evil in the inside.

thus I think I’ll agree with Rahul and Michael. it’s more about the hidden things.