Good Characters, Inc. Blog

For thousands of moms in Sichuan, China, the day after Mother’s Day will be remembered as their worst day ever. On that day, Monday May 12, 2008, a 7.9 earthquake took the lives of their children.

If you know someone who has lost a love one, the most common way to express sympathy is to say, “Qing Jie Ai,” pronounced cheeng jee-eh eye.

Qing (cheeng) means please. Jie Ai (jee-eh eye) means to restrain one’s grief and accept the change.

For anyone interested in numbers and symbolism, this quake, registering nearly 8 on the Richter scale, has a lot that can be talked about. The number 8, traditionally a symbol for prosperity and good luck in the southern part of China, has not been lucky so far for China this year. The quake struck 88 days before the Summer Olympics is scheduled to begin in Beijing; the official start is slated for 08-08-08, at 8 p.m. Some researchers linked the quake to a shift of the Tibetan plateau to the north and east. The day of the quake was the birthday of Lord Buddha in China, which is the eighth day of fourth lunar month. The epicenter was in Sichuan Province, which is, literally, the place of four (si) rivers (chuan).

There are many naming experts who advise on the do’s and don’t’s of naming, but then there are always creative entreprerneurs who break the rules.

A store in Hong Kong named “Delay No Mall” is a good example. It has a name that sounds profane and yet caters to teens’ rebellion and anti-establishment imaginations. 

As any resident of Hong Kong would tell you, the English pronunciation of “delay no more” sounds just like the curse phrase “F*** your mother” in Cantonese.

It’s sort of like the Chinese version of FCUK, which is, supposely, the acronym for the clothing company French Connection (FC) followed by the abbreviation for a branch location, the UK. The clothing company exploited the association of the F word and produced extremely popular t-shirts.

Doing a search on Wikipedia, I found that the company French Connection “apparently first discovered the acronym when a fax was sent from their Hong Kong store FCHK to FCUK.”

To cool accusations that Delay No Mall is in bad taste, the store’s staff has been instructed to pronounce the name as “Delay No Mao” instead of “Delay No Mall.”
 
Links:

• Delay No Mall (Ming Pao) 
• French Connection UK (Wiki)
• Delay No Mall partially open!
• Delay No Mall (Chinese)
  港出位商場以髒話命名取諧音”罵人娘親”
• A Survey of Language Usage (Chinese)
  性暴力語言意見調查
• Delay No Mao (Chinese)
  商場名似粗口 不讀 Delay No Mall 強讀 Delay No 貓

AdAge reports that a new study from OMD Worldwide found that ethnic groups are turned off by ads that rely on stereotypes and caricatures rather than meaningful cultural cues.

Key points that are relevant when doing business in China or with the Chinese:

• “The respondents were saying, ‘We want to see ourselves represented in ads, but not in a stereotypical manner,’” said Pamela Marsh, group director-primary research and insights at the Omnicom media agency.
   
  Comment: This seems to be common sense although there is a fine line between typical and stereotypical.
   
• The ethnic groups agreed that messages should be culturally relevant, but they responded more positively to ads with multicultural cues, such as ethnic characters, phrases, expressions and values, than ads that were simply translations of general-market ads.
   
  Comment: Very often companies simply have their ads and marketing material translated from English to Chinese believing that simple translation will get their point across. Typically it doesn’t work this way. A more reliable method is to use culturally relevant ways to express the same idea instead of merely translating marketing ads.
   
• “Ad relevancy is more about communicating in kind than speaking in a language,” Ms. Marsh said. 
   
• Asians used the internet at significantly higher rates.
   
  Comment: Since the population in China is much greater than in the U.S., it is likely that in a few years there will be more people in China using the Internet than the entire U.S. population.
   
• According to the study, Asian-Americans also rely heavily on word-of-mouth because they are less receptive to ads than other segments of the population.
   
  Comment: Perhaps this is because several generations of Chinese and Taiwanese have endured several wars and various political propaganda. Hence they have learned to place less trust on the media and rely more on word-of-mouth. The good thing is that people are more ready to accept that an undesirable purchase was simply “bad luck” and they do not blame others or start lawsuits. On the other hand, the lower level of trust among Chinese makes life more difficult and less enjoyable. Until recently, you could not make a purchase in China or Taiwan and expect to receive a refund even if the product was defective or didn’t work as claimed. Thus people have to be very cautious before making a purchase.

What do you think?

Original:

• When Targeting Multicultural Audiences, Be Relevant
  OMD Study: Doing it wrong is worse than not doing it at all

Bloomberg has an article about Google’s Chinese name titled China Can’t Spell G-O-O-G-L-E as Search Engine Falters as Verb. Here are some points from the article and some comments:

1. “Google is struggling to become a verb in China.”
    
   No matter how hard Google struggles, Google’s Chinese name will never become a verb in China. The Chinese translation of Google means “harvesting song.” It does not have verb potential.
    
2. “G-O-O-G-L-E is not of normal Chinese spelling and people don’t pronounce it right.”
    
   This is not a factor because, as with any English term, the Chinese have to learn how to spell it. And it’s easy to remember the word Google.
    
3. “China, the world’s second-largest Internet market with 162 million users, may overtake the U.S. in three to five years.”
    
4. “Google last year acquired the ‘G.cn’ domain so users who misspell the company’s name still get directed to its Chinese-language Web site ‘Guge,’ or ‘harvesting song.’ The adoption of the name in 2006 prompted criticism that it was a song about something going downhill because ‘gu’ also means valley.”
    
   G.cn is one of the shortest domain names in the world.
    
5. “It’s a name that would appear to have been picked by someone who doesn’t know Chinese,” said Liu Bin, an analyst at Beijing-based researcher BDA China Ltd. “It hasn’t helped their marketing.”
    
   I am sure the name has been reviewed and evaluated by many Chinese-speaking managers and engineers at Google before the final decision was reached. Being reviewed by Chinese doesn’t guarantee that the best name was chosen, however.
    
   When you have a committee trying to make a decision on a name, the tendency is for the majority to pick a name that is safe and usual. That way, nobody gets fired because of a name. However, typically a name that will become engraved in a person’s mind is a name that is unusual, and may even be disliked. Most people say they want to have a great name, but they lack the guts to be bold for fear that the name may be too extreme. Instead, most people opt to follow the crowd with what is safe and, therefore, merely good, but not the best name.
    
6. The company will begin “some experimentation” for advertising in the next 30 days, Lee said. “In China, we need to do more. If people don’t know Google is a search engine, or if they can’t spell Google, they don’t know you are better.”
    
   Some experimentation for advertising will surely cost more than if they had just adopt a better name such as Guge, Brother Gu, as suggested in my 2006 blog entry Danger: Google’s Lost in Translation … Try it. It’s better than singing a sad song in the valley. People can easily make “Wen Gu Ge” (ask Google) and “Zhao Gu Ge” (search Google) part of their daily language. You can’t ask a Song anything.

The Article:

• China Can’t Spell G-O-O-G-L-E as Search Engine Falters as Verb

New statistics from China: 

• More than 85 percent of China’s 1.3 billion people use 3-character names.
• More than 160 million people have 2-character names.
• About 2 million people have names of more than 4 characters.
• The longest name found among Han Chinese reaches 15 characters.
• Nearly 1,000 people have names with 10 or more characters.
• Although they attempt to limit Han Chinese names to 6 characters, regulations allow ethnic minorities to use longer names in their native languages and transliterations in Chinese. The latter are required for formal documents.

Links:

• Name game: most Chinese use 3 characters, some use 10 or more
• National Citizen Identity Information Center (NCIIC) (Chinese)
• The longest name found among Han Chinese reaches 15 characters (Chinese)
  漢族公民最長姓名十五個字

From The New York Times:

YUMBERRY sounds more like the creation of an advertising agency than of nature—like Cherry Garcia or Juicy Fruit. But while the name was dreamed up a few years ago to help sell the fruit’s juice, which is just now appearing in stores around the country, the fruit has been grown for 2,000 years in China. 

The name yumberry was coined about 2003 by Charles Stenftenagel, a garden products importer from Indiana, when he was visiting a friend in Shanghai who owned a company that bottled the juice.

The fresh fruit, called yang-mei, is chewy and juicy with a pit like a cherry. Most varieties have a bumpy purple or red surface, like a litchi, although the skin is edible.  

“Since the way they pronounced yang-mei in their dialect was ‘yang-mee,’ it sounded a little like ‘yummy,’ and that gave me the idea to call it ‘yumberry,’” Mr. Stenftenagel said. “We thought it might be a catchy name.”

Some think yumberry’s the next pomegranate.

Links: 

• Yumberry Juice 
  上海杨百利杨梅
• From China, Only in a Bottle, a Berry With an Alluring Name
  The New York Times

Would you ever fold your business card in half before handing it to a prospective customer? Would you turn down a corner to indicate that you presented the card in person? Strange as these may sound, they were part of the etiquette of the first uses of business cards.

Actually, the first uses were social, not business. Although they probably originated in China in the 15th century, the first forerunners to the business card in the West appeared 200 years later. They were visiting cards, or calling cards. A gentleman would introduce his arrival at the home of another person of social status by have his footman present the card to a servant of the gentleman or lady he wished to visit. The cards were elaborately decorated, a sign of the bearer’s position, and treated with great ceremony and strict rules.

At about the same time, merchants in London began using another type of card—a trade card. It was basically an advertisement—a picture and company name on one side and directions to the merchant on the other. Without city maps, street addresses, or much in the way of newspaper promotion, the trade card was essential in bringing customers to the merchant’s location.

Gradually the functions of the two types of cards—introduction and soliciting business—merged into the modern business card. They became a little smaller, less elaborate, more colorful, and more varied. Still, like the cards that have been around for at least 400, probably 600 years, they are an important reflection of the person who presents them.

Do these Chinese brands sound like any names you know? A car dubbed Hongda? A retail store called Wumart? A Redberry wireless e-mail device? Some non-Chinese companies think so. And they are not happy with what appear to be attempts to capitalize on their good names.
 
The imitation of well known brands is probably not really an effort to defraud. Many Chinese companies are just beginning to venture into the international market, and they are not used to the branding competition there. With little effort or originality, they simply choose names they hope will allow consumers to recognize the type of product or service they offer.

So a Chinese automobile manufacturer produces a car that looks like a Land Rover and calls it “Roewe.” Another car maker builds a vehicle very similar to the Chevy Spark and names it “Chery.” The Chinese Internet company Baidu.com features BaiduSpace and Baidupedia. A coffee retailer uses the name “Xingbake,” which is “Starbucks” in Chinese.

Whether innocent marketing choices or deliberate attempts to cash in on someone else’s success, these names are angering the companies they imitate. Those companies are expressing that anger in complaints and lawsuits.

As Chinese firms expand their international business, they will need to learn how that market works. Consumers, especially Western consumers, want brands they know and trust. To sell to them, Chinese companies will need to develop and promote their own brands. They will need the sophistication, expertise, and experience of brand-consulting services.

Links:

• Copycat Chinese Brand Names Drawing Multinational’s Ire
• From Hongda to Wumart, China Brand Names Have Familiar Ring

As China gears up to host the Olympic Games, it has created five mascots. They are cartoon figures of a fish, a panda, a Tibetan antelope, a swallow, and the Olympic flame. They represent five features of nature: sea, forest, fire, earth, and sky. Each mascot has a two-syllable name in English, and combining the first syllables from all five produces the greeting “Beijing Huan Ying Ni,” which means “Beijing welcomes you.” They seemed the perfect characters for the international event.

But what to call them collectively in English? The Olympic committee settled on the name “Five Friendlies” for the friendly little creatures. But the name caused confusion and negative feelings. “Friendly” is a word in English, but “friendlies” is not. It sounds like “friendless,” something no one wants to be. And when written, it looks like “friend lies,” something no one wants his or her friend to do.

So the Olympic committee renamed the mascots “Fuwa.” Combining “fu,” good fortune, with “wa,” baby, the word means a good and fortunate child. It is a popular expression in southern China. Fuwa may not mean “friendly,” but it is certainly a more user-friendly term for five very cute mascots.

Links:

• Olympic Friendlies Come Under Fire
• Mascots Renamed “Fuwa”
• Chinese Olympic Mascots Renamed as Transliterated Pinyin Name Fuwa (Chinese)
  奥运福娃改译名 传递信息更丰富

The Shanghai Automotive Industrial Corp. (SAIC), China’s second-largest carmaker, has announced it will call its first self-made car the Roewe. The name seems to be similar to “Rover,” the BMW brand SAIC tried to buy earlier in the year. The sale, however, went to Ford instead.

The official word is that the name Roewe is inspired not by the Rover, but by 创新 (innovation), 殊荣 (honor and glory), 威 (might, power, or prestige), 仪 (appear), and 四海 (four seas, or, the whole world). When written in Chinese characters, it is 荣威 (rong wei). Its literal meaning is glory and power. But according to the official explanation, this Wei should be translated as prestige.

The name might seem prestigious in Chinese, but in English, Roewe, or Rong Wei, sounds like Wrong Way. Is this a good name for a car you hope will take you to the right place?

Could this be another Chinese-to-English Translation Blunders?

Links: 

• Rong Wei? Funny Name, Serious Car From SAIC of China
• Rover becomes ‘Roewe’
• The Shanghai Automotive Industrial Corp. Announces Rong Wei (Chinese)
  创新传塑经典，上汽自主品牌“荣威”全新亮相
• New Name Roewe Explained (Chinese)
  荣威 (Roewe) 品牌命名诠释
  This article explains the meaning behind the English Roewe and Chinese Rong Wei names. It says Roewe’s R is associated with “royal” and “-we” hints at we, us, representing unity and meaning “unity of will is an impregnable stronghold.” The English pronunciation of Roewe sounds like Rong Wei in Chinese; the Spanish pronunciation sounds like the Chinese term “ru yi,” meaning “as one wishes.”