Choose your codepage:

CONTENTS:

Main Page

Live and Learn!

Places Worth to Visit

Notes about China
(Almost Seriously)

Let's Exchange

Other Authors' Works

Webmaster's Elementary

E-Mail

World brandnames in Chinese

There are many goods from other countries'manufacturers on Chinese market. The products of well-known companies are presented widely. The brandnames of such companies are treated by marketing specialist as "recognizable". As a rule, recognizable brandnames are logotypes in Latin letters.

Unluckily, Chinese en masse do not know foreign languages, and Latin letters tell almost nothing to them. But hieroglyphs do tell everything.

Because of it, self-respecting companies create hieroglyphic logotypes prior to coming to China. Doing this, they are reaching the customers' hearts from two sides at once: first, hieroglyphic brandnames are remembered well by Chinese, and second, the commodity bearing such a logotype seems more closer.

Below there are some of best-known hieroglyphic brandnames accompanied by pinyin transcription. How to tune your browser for Chinese characters, read here.

Food products

Hi-tech consumer goods

As a rule, the vast majority of brandnames in this area Japanese. Names of Japanese companies are of hieroglyphic origin (exept for brands like SONY or SHARP). This why, transcription of such brands is often very unlike to their Latin twins.

Automobiles and motorcycles

Hieroglyphic brandnames can be formed in one of three main ways:

1. Straight transcription. To reproduce the phonation they choose characters either neutral or positive-meaning. The most succesful example of it is Coca-Cola, whose Chinese variant persistently hints at the product's exclusive cosumer values, leaving the English original far behind. Opel also looks good, its hieroglyphs mean "European treasure".
2. Translation of the meaning. From examples above, there are only Nestle, Pioneer, VW an GM which are translated in this way. These brands are formed from widely-used words very easy to translate.
3. The goods from Japan and Korea (China is very important market for them) are usually born with hieroglyphic labels. In China they are simply read according to Chinese phonetics.

Despite of fact that Japanese characters actually were Chinese ones borrowed long time ago, there were different changes with them at the opposite shores of the Yellow Sea. Nowadays, the same hieroglyph can have different meanings in Chinese and Japanese.

As an example, here is a curious story of some Japanese brandname in China.

In late '80s one Japanese company established its representation in Peking. Made a good-looking signboard. The signboard had immediately attracted a crowd of local inhabitants and passers-bye laughing and pointing at the company's logo. The matter is that the company's hieroglyphs 野尻 are translated from Japanese as "valley's edge" but mean "wild butt" in Chinese.

So a logo in Chinese is a very crucial point.

Copyright info:

© Dmitry Alemasov

All texts on the site composed by me except where otherwise stated. The text of another author will not appear without author's permission.

If the English text was translated by its author, the translator's name is not stated. Otherwise translator's name is stated separately.

The graphics: except for my logo, copyrights to all other logos belong to their respective owners. Photos copyrighted by me except for otherwise stated.