Thanks, Karin! The NYT recently had a fascinating article about brand names in China, too: Picking Brand Names in China is a Business Itself. In other global brand names new, a German company recently won the right to name a beer ‘Fucking Hell,’ after the name of the town of Fucking in Austria: see German Firm Wins Right to Make Beer Called ‘Fucking Hell’ (Spiegel)

All the best

best
Anna

When I noticed brand name transliteration happening in Sri Lanka it struck me as rather lame. I believe you find it in certain brands of cheese and pasta around the world, but it’s such a token form of multilinguism that it might as well not be there. Seriously, it just says “Cheese”. Or “Pasta”. In the Sinhala script. And that’s it!

Funniest one ever saw was a double translate on a Chinese health salon. They’d translated their name into direct English which meant that the word “Pe Na No” was written on the side, followed by the English sounds writen out in Arabic. I’m not sure whether it made sense in either language.

Li, F., & Shooshtari, N. H. (2007). Multinational Corporations’ Controversial Ad Campaigns in China: Lessons from Nike and Toyota. Advertising and society, 8(1).

Here is the abstract:
As both the world’s third-largest advertising economy and an emerging market, China promises great potential for multinational corporations. However, the multiethnic Chinese culture, with its unique history and values, as well as its complex ideographic script and independent visual culture, also challenges the ability of the multinationals to communicate accurately, effectively, and without offense. In this article, we discuss Toyota’s 2003 and Nike’s 2004 ad campaigns, both of which were banned by the Chinese government in response to consumer outrage. In essence, we propose that incongruent cultural views of consumers and marketers, a lack of historical sensitivity on the part of the advertisers, and different levels of sociolinguistic ability between the makers and their audience resulted in such a failure.

Anyone who mindlessly repeats this tale has no clue what they are talking about–and that includes the branding consultants who use it to scare up more customers.

I’ve investigated a lot of similar stories and I’ve yet to find one where there is any *evidence* that a brand name had a negative impact on sales because of a translation problem.

This is different from the translation v. transliteration issue. There are lots of brand names where the underlying imagery or metaphor that is available in English does not translate. But since the primary function of a brand is recognition, not metaphorical meaning, this is rarely a significant problem.

Occasionally one can do a transliteration that does both, as in certain Chinese dialects where Coca-Cola can be transliterated using characters that can mean “let the mouth rejoice,” but this is rare and serendipitous when it happens. (And yes, the “bite the wax tadpole” story is another myth.)

In relation to the transliterated brand names, I found that the name of McDonald’s ‘Happy Meal’ in English is translated or transliterated as ‘Happy set’ in Japanese and ‘Happy little box’ in Spanish, but ‘Happy meal’ in Korean.

Here, the Spanish version (actually, I can’t read Spanish at all) sounds transliterated into Spanish with the meaning of ‘Happy little box’, but the Japanese and Korean versions are written in Japanese (‘Katakana’) and Korean scripts, respectively.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Meal

Another example might be this one:
http://www.amadehlaziz.com/amadehlazizbrand/images/products/files/20091003122034_morgh-b.jpg

This is the brandname (Noodelite) for a kind of ready-in-3-minute Noodle in IRAN.
I’m not 100% sure about the origin of the name but I think it may orinially refer to the English “Elite Noodles”.

Health & Peace,
vahid