Fili’s world

“The song of the valley”. Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? If would be great for you if you could find a Chinese name that translates into something like that, wouldn’t it?

There’s a very famous casestudy of the Coca-Cola company. Here’s the bit from Wiki :
“It is often repeated as an urban legend that the Coca-Cola company mistranslated its product’s name into a string of characters meaning “Bite the wax tadpole” while attempting to market the product in Chinese. In reality, some local Chinese shopkeepers did create their own signs in an effort to approximate the sound of the product’s name, resulting in kǒukē-kǒulà (口蝌口蜡), which might more literally be translated as “mouth tadpole, mouth wax”. However, the Coca-Cola company itself never adopted such a translation. After reviewing all of the possible soundalikes, the company officially adopted kěkǒu-kělè (可口可乐), meaning roughly “to allow the mouth to be able to rejoice”.”

Now, if you were a massive IT giant expanding into China, like, say, Google, what Chinese characters would you choose that would sound like the originals but would also create a good image?
Yep, the money invested in the local Chinese branding didn’t go to waste, as Google is now Gu3Ge1 (谷歌) in Chinese - “Song of the valley” or “Valley Song” (though I admit I only recognized the Ge1 part).

To see the wonderful GuGe-Google video click here

(BTW - I find it ironic that they market Google to Communist Chinese as an advanced voting system)

It’s interesting that while it sounds great to me, as a foreigner that has nothing in Chinese to compare it to, it seems like some Chinese are not as happy about the name, associating it with a bird name or a poor peasant harvest (see “No-Guge” website here). Even the multimillion dollar companies can’t escape the hardships of Chinese language (but maybe it was done on purpose, you can never know). Hmm…