And why the Cantonese flavour? Until recently, British and most western companies did business with China through Hong Kong . Their Chinese names were given to them in Hong Kong . As a result, many British brand names carry strong Cantonese overtones. However, nowadays, companies enter the China market in many ways, and not just through Hong Kong. Using a Cantonese-sounding name would be the equivalent of naming your company in heavy Geordie or really broad northern accent.
So how should companies go about choosing a Chinese name for their company or for their product? There are no easy answers. The issues are as fundamental and strategic in Chinese as in English. To begin with, should you have a Chinese name? The conventional marketing wisdom says that global consistency is important. But if your target market can’t read your name, can’t pronounce it and can’t remember it, there is no consistency.
Product naming is even more demanding. What to a westerner might be a carefully named and uniquely identifiable product or brand, in which that company may have invested a lot of time and effort, may count for nothing when that name is translated into Chinese. You may go to great trouble to serve Chateau Mouton-Rothschild to your Chinese guests at a dinner, for example, only for the interpreter to translate the name as a ‘French wine’ when asked to tell the guests what the wine is. That is not his or her fault: it is just because there is not a Chinese name (yet) for every French wine. I often wonder how much more France might have been able to sell to China if someone had found a way of giving each make of French wine an individual name in Chinese.
And the Italians, too. The Chinese language has only one name for the entire pasta family. Ba ck -translated into English, the Chinese call every single variety of pasta ‘Italian noodles’. I would argue that, to persuade Chinese to enjoy pasta, someone needs to come up with names that are 1) pasta-suggestive, 2) easy to remember and 3) individual for each member of the family: lasagna, linguine, fusilli, macaroni, bertolli, vermicelli, tagliatelle, cannelloni, capellini, farfalle, gnocchi, penne and so on, as well as the sauces: pesto, carbonare, etc, etc. Come to think of it, I might even have a go myself.
The challenge
The same is true in sectors where Britain has world-leading companies and products or services. Telecommunications, pharmaceutical, engineering and technology companies are full of acronyms and concocted phrases. They are not translatable. Naming them is close to impossible - particularly if your name is one of these: Timesco, NeuW, Quinetiq, PicoChip, Lempsip, Neurofen and Kleenex.
But it has to be done. Consumers will not buy a product with a name they cannot even pronounce. If a word does not register, it goes right past you. If that word is the name of the product or service you try to sell in China , good luck to you.
Some companies have managed to get it right, and in Coca-Cola’s case, spectacularly so. Coca-Cola’s Chinese name sounds, looks and feels like its English name. The transliteration is faithful (kekou kele), and easily understood across China . The characters used contain the radical (meaning element) for “mouth” - which is highly appropriate for something that you drink. In Chinese, the characters mean ‘palatable and joyful’. So the name just by itself goes a long way to selling the product.
With Coca-Cola as the benchmark, we know that we need to get three things right: the sound, the characters and the presentation of the characters. But, there are no standard ways of rendering an English name in Chinese. The challenge is to achieve optimal balance between global consistency and localisation. I have provided a list of some of the common methods used in arriving at a name in Chinese. There are advantages and disadvantages to each method.
In English and other romanised languages there is a fixed link between the letters that make up the written word and the pronunciation of the word. In Chinese, there is not such a link. Given the same pronunciation, there are easily a dozen different characters available.
This is why if you give your name to different people to transliterate, you will get different versions. There is no one correct version. As each has its own implications and nuance, the naming process needs to be thorough to avoid achieving your objective in one way but falling foul of something else (the table to the right compares the pros and cons of five ways of getting a name in Chinese).
The can of worms
When Land Rover first launched in China , the Chinese transliteration they used meant ‘land tiger’. This year, the company is launching a new model and want to stress its on-road performance. To help communicate the message, the company changed the Chinese character representing ‘land’ (a character implying cross-country) to the one representing ‘road’. As the two characters share the same pronunciation, the company managed to fine-tune its marketing without a major upheaval in the name.
But the complication is, of course, that Land Rover is the name of the company too. Also, if they ever want to stress off-road performance of a future model, will they change the character again? This is not a criticism of Land Rover but an illustration of the multi-faceted nature of the exercise. There are many more examples.
The Chinese name for the hotel, Conrad, is a transliteration based on Cantonese. The characters used can be thought of as meaning ‘Hong Kong Pretty’. Recently, I che ck ed a group of my clients into Conrad London and needed to tell them where they were staying. Guess what they asked: why was a London hotel called ‘Hong Kong Pretty’? Clearly, Conrad needs a name to market the group, not just one hotel in Hong Kong .
Wall’s ice-cream is He Lu Xue in China which, using the table below, is a good illustration of a total localisation of a name. Apart from the character used for Xue (meaning snow), there seems to be nothing in the name about the company Unilever, or about what the company wants customers to think of the product, or that this is a foreign brand - a very powerful differentiator in a crowded market. But I would assume that this is exactly what Unilever wishes to achieve - selling a local brand, rather than a foreign brand.
The English name Vodafone tells you instantly the company sells phone-related products. But its Chinese name contains no trace of phone or anything remotely related to telecommunication. Is this what the company intended?
McDonalds was lucky in that the company had been ‘sold’ to Chinese consumers as a success story through English-language textbooks and mass media long before the company was allowed into China . That meant that its Chinese name was not quite so important and why it can sell its burgers in outlets called ‘Wheat As Labour’ (one way to ba ck -translate McDonald’s Chinese name).
The plain looks
After you have got the sound right and the characters right, the next thing to tackle is the visual image or identity of your name. What Chinese font has been used for your name? Is it consistent with your English font? Which Chinese fonts correspond with, say, Arial Black , Times New Roman, Courier, Garamond, Impact, Sans Serif, and so on?
Many British corporate names in Chinese have been generated from the basic character list available in Microsoft Word. This is like typing your company’s English name using a basic font like Arial and not bothering to use a designer to create a distinctive look for the name.
In short, any company choosing fonts or designs needs to apply the same stringent criteria of presentation to their Chinese brand name as they do to their English name (the colour, the angle, the spacing, the tilt, the shadows, etc, assuming again that angles, spacing, shadows have the same effect on a Chinese eye).
 One method that accommodates both consistency and localisation is to incorporate the two names. The solution I have used for my company is to add Chinese to our English logo.
Haagen-Dazs is one of the few brands that has explored the visual element of Chinese characters to excellent effect. In addition to the character used for the sound “haa” (being the Chinese onomatopoeic for laughter) the umlaut above H?agen is transplanted onto the Chinese character, to make it look like a laughing face, at the same time creating that vital link with its corporate logo. You see the name. You recognise the brand. You feel the urge to buy. It is (almost) as simple as that.
(The above is an article written by Dr Kevin Lin and published by China-Britain Business Council as well as Great Britain China Centre.) |
