{"id":11221,"date":"2011-11-15T20:11:17","date_gmt":"2011-11-15T20:11:17","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2011-11-15T20:11:53","modified_gmt":"2011-11-15T20:11:53","slug":"Brands-Lost-in-Translation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/?p=11221","title":{"rendered":"Brands Lost in Translation"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Western products are transliterated into Chinese, the results can range from poetic to the metaphysical. More than many nations, China is a place where names are imbued with deep significance. Western companies looking to bring their products to China face a problem not unlike that of Chinese parents naming a baby boy: little Gang (\u201cstrong\u201d) may be regarded quite differently than little Yun (\u201ccloud\u201d). Given that China\u2019s market for consumer goods is growing by better than 13 percent annually \u2014 and luxury-goods sales by 25 percent \u2014 an off-key name could have serious financial consequences. And so the art of picking a brand name that resonates with Chinese consumers is no longer an art. It has become a sort of science, with consultants, computer programs and linguistic analyses to ensure that what tickles a Mandarin ear does not grate on a Cantonese one.<\/strong> <\/p>\n

Art \u201cis only a very, very tiny piece of it,\u201d said Vladimir Djurovic, president of the Labbrand Consulting Company in Shanghai, which has made a business of finding names for Western companies entering the Chinese market. Maybe. But there is a lot of artistry in the best of the West. The paradigm probably is the Chinese name for Coca-Cola, Kekoukele, which not only sounds like Coke\u2019s English name, but conveys its essence of taste and fun in a way that the original name could not hope to match. There are many others. Consider Tide detergent, Taizi, whose Chinese characters literally mean \u201cgets rid of dirt.\u201d (Characters are important: the same sound written differently could mean \u201ctoo purple.\u201d) There is also Reebok, or Rui bu, which means \u201cquick steps.\u201d And Colgate \u2014 Gao lu jie \u2014 which translates into \u201crevealing superior cleanliness.\u201d And Lay\u2019s snack foods \u2014 Le shi \u2014 whose name means \u201chappy things.\u201d Nike (Nai ke) and BMW (Bao Ma, echoing the first two sounds of its English and German names) also have worn well on Chinese ears. Still, finding a good name involves more than coming up with clever homonyms to the original English. \u201cDo you want to translate your name, or come up with a Chinese brand?\u201d said Monica Lee, the managing director of the Brand Union, a Beijing consultancy. \u201cIf you go for phonetic sounds, everyone knows where you are from \u2014 you\u2019re immediately identified as a foreign brand.\u201d<\/strong> <\/p>\n

For some products, having a foreign-sounding name lends a cachet that a true Chinese name would lack. Many upscale brands like Cadillac (Ka di la ke), or Hilton (Xi er dun), employ phonetic translations that mean nothing in Chinese. Rolls-Royce (Laosi-Laisi) includes two Chinese characters for \u201clabor\u201d and \u201cplants\u201d that more or less have become standard usage in foreign names \u2014 all to achieve a distinct foreign look and sound. Microsoft had to think twice about bringing its Bing search engine here because in Chinese, the most common definitions of the character pronounced \u201cbing\u201d are \u201cdisease,\u201d \u201cdefect\u201d and \u201cvirus\u201d \u2014 rather inauspicious for a computer product. The revised name, Bi ying, roughly means \u201cresponds without fail.\u201d<\/strong> <\/p>\n

SOURCE<\/a>
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When Western products are transliterated into Chinese, the results can range from poetic to the metaphysical. More than many nations,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1213,"featured_media":72448,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"magazineBlocksPostFeaturedMedia":{"thumbnail":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u-113x150.jpg","medium":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","medium_large":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","large":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","1536x1536":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","2048x2048":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-highlighted-post":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-featured-post-medium":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-featured-post-small":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u-113x90.jpg","colormag-featured-image":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-default-news":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u-113x150.jpg","colormag-featured-image-large":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-elementor-block-extra-large-thumbnail":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-elementor-grid-large-thumbnail":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-elementor-grid-small-thumbnail":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-elementor-grid-medium-large-thumbnail":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg"},"magazineBlocksPostAuthor":{"name":"Joshua","avatar":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/62ee23f8f40307578d1f284ecd823d77f32da8ea35541e7dbdafeb5da1a4e877?s=96&d=mm&r=g"},"magazineBlocksPostCommentsNumber":"0","magazineBlocksPostExcerpt":"When Western products are transliterated into Chinese, the results can range from poetic to the metaphysical. More than many nations,","magazineBlocksPostCategories":[],"magazineBlocksPostViewCount":157,"magazineBlocksPostReadTime":3,"magazine_blocks_featured_image_url":{"full":["https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg",113,170,false],"medium":["https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg",113,170,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u-113x150.jpg",113,150,true]},"magazine_blocks_author":{"display_name":"Joshua","author_link":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/?author=1213"},"magazine_blocks_comment":0,"magazine_blocks_author_image":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/62ee23f8f40307578d1f284ecd823d77f32da8ea35541e7dbdafeb5da1a4e877?s=96&d=mm&r=g","magazine_blocks_category":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1213"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11221\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/72448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}