Why Your Business Needs a Chinese Name | Hacker News Reader

Why Your Business Needs a Chinese Name

mygengo.com

72 pointsbike_to_work56 comments

It's foolish to claim that bing has only claimed a small market share due to homophonic issues. Don't think for a second that the Bing brand wasn't overthought on every level. I can guarantee that they considered the Chinese localization before launch. Bing has enough problems gaining market share in markets where Bing has a vaguely positive sound to it.

For bona fides, I worked on many projects where we developed localized Chinese names for new and existing global brands. We charged through the nose for this. The numbers you are looking for end in six zeros. This was a couple years ago when China was even more of a black box than it is now and there was a sense of herd panic about getting in. License to print money. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Yes, you should worry about the transliteration, but if you are a western based company and want to move into the chinese market, you have much much much bigger concerns, namely getting shut out by any given joint venture partner that you shack up with, with onerous "technology sharing" terms which results in your company getting pillaged and left on the side of the (market) road. Or watch as your market is crowded out by a home grown tech-alike (supported by the chinese government).

And this stuff is way overthought most of the time. Coke isn't exactly a positive association on any level (drug, sounds like a bit like slang for other unmentionables, coal). I could go on all day spewing this but ultimately, as weird as some names are, as much as brand consultants like to BS clients with this rubbish, it is a much richer set of factors that determine brand & business success in the market.

Bing has enough problems gaining market share in markets where Bing has a vaguely positive sound to it.

Heh, I'm curious what market that might be. The only associations I can come up with are bing cherries and Bing Crosby. Neutral at best :-)

I think of quiz-shows (like Wait Wait Don't Tell Me), where there's often a bell to indicate a correct answer. Also (and probably related), Bingo.

I always think of the Mafia.

I think the name is one of the factors, but probably not the primary factor. But the point of the article is not really about search engine business models.

> This search engine giant — known as 必应 (biying) — also found it difficult to break into the Chinese market, partly due to its unfortunate choice of a name that sounds similar to the Chinese word for sickness: 病 (bing). So far, it's only managed to monopolize less than five percent of the market.

It's unfortunate when someone who knows nothing about a topic decides to start making assumptions. For example, bing has many different meanings depending on the tone used:

bīng/bing1: 兵,冰,掤,栟,檳

bǐng/bing3: 丙,屏,怲,昺,柄,炳,秉,稟,苪,邴,鉼,鞞,餅

bìng/bing4: 並,併,寎,并,摒,病

The one that means sickness is only the last one.

Unfortunately the pronunciation of "Bing" in English is more often the same as the last one in Chinese, and frankly none of the characters you listed above, maybe except 冰 (means ice) and 饼 (means cake), has any good implications at all, let alone relevance to searching.

"Microsoft has Bing", translated to Chinese 微软有病 (literally "Microsoft has sickness", or "Microsoft is sick"), is a serious joke about Bing's launch in China. That's not to say it is a marketing mistake, though. At least it gets people's attention. It's wrong to attribute Bing's failure to capture significant market share to its Chinese name, as others suggested in the comments.

Google (谷歌) has similar problems in its Chinese branding. The name 谷歌 (valley song? WTF?) is an absolutely non-sense for a search engine.

Local brands are usually better in this regard. For example, Baidu's name (百度) comes from a famous Chinese poem by 辛弃疾 which depicts a scene where a guy is searching for his lover in a crowded festival night. Search engine? No problem!

Here's the complete poem if you can read Chinese:

《青玉案·元夕》辛弃疾(宋)

东风夜放花千树，更吹落星如雨。宝马雕车香满路，凤箫声动，玉壶光转，一夜鱼龙舞。

蛾儿雪柳黄金缕，笑语盈盈暗香去。众里寻他千百度，蓦然回首，那人却在，灯火阑珊处。

PS. If you are careful enough you will find BMW's Chinese name 宝马 (means precious horse) also appeared in this poem, thought I'm pretty sure this is not the first use of the term. Ancient Chinese nobels rely heavily on horses for transportation, which matches BMW's high-end status perfectly.

I always thought 百度 literally means 100 degrees, as in Celsius, the boiling point of water. Maybe there's a secondary meaning saying "This search engine is hot".

Yes, but when someone points out that single unfortunate pun, do hordes upon hordes of their friends soberly point out that it's maybe a bit of a stretch, or do they go crazy repeating it over and over and over on the internet?

Exactly. Additionally, this fluff piece article makes no mention of successful local Chinese brand names, particularly the unusual cases of the numeric domains (both the numerology related domains and the more relevant homophone number domains).

> > ... only managed to monopolize less than five percent of the market *> It's unfortunate when someone who knows nothing about a topic decides to start making assumptions.

It isn't just the lack of Chinese knowledge. I prefer to take marketing advice from people who at least know what the word monopolise means. (hint: 5% isn't it)

Actually, "bing" in English sounds exactly the same as the last one, bing4.

My two favorites: Coke and BMW.

As sdz points out in his/her comment, whoever came up with Coke's name 'ke kou ke le' did an amazingly clever job while still retaining much of the sound of the original. [1]

Yet to be mentioned is BMW, one of my personal favorites. Their Chinese name, 宝马 (bao ma), literally means 'Treasured Horse' [2] but its more than that. 宝宝 (bao bao) is a common way to address a baby, something like 'little treasure' but not so pretentious in Chinese. And there are stories (I think from the 3 Kingdoms era) which refer to a character's reliable and sturdy horse as, "so-and-so's Bao Ma". Really a great name.

Coincidentally, as you might expect, its very hard for non-Chinese to understand the nuances of Chinese names. I have a modest command of Mandarin but some names that I think are quite interesting (Sprite - Xue Bi - ~Snow Jade) are not very well thought of by my Chinese relatives. Others like Subway (sai bai wei) which I thought was kinda wonky (100 Flavors?) are big hits as the article mentions.

1. Coke - http://goodcharacters.com/blog/blog.php?id=79

2. BMW Bao Ma - http://goodcharacters.com/blog/blog.php?id=66

[Update: added link to explanation of Coke's transliteration]

FYI, Subway (赛百味, Sai Bai Wei) would mean "better than other 100 flavors" in Chinese, which isn't true at all: for most Chinese, subways are not that tasty. But the name is great!

In India, bing is bing, subway is subway and coca cola is coca cola. Irrespective of that Google has around 89% market share. Considering other search engines, bing would have as much market share as in China. Coca Cola and its Indian counterpart(Thums-up) have around 20% market share. Subway is as popular and though I dont have the numbers based on a cursory search, I am sure the numbers are again comparable.

The argument in the article doesnt hold. These companies/products have succeeded/failed not because of their name but because they were good.

Speaking of names, IPad was probably not the best chosen name. It hasn't stopped it from being a success.

India speaks mostly Indo-European languages.

Chinese is a Sino-Tibetian language and much different. Most Chinese would have a hard time remembering Western names, let alone pronouncing them.

Not really relevant. English is much more pervasive in India (it's one of India's national languages!) than in China, despite English being one of the most-learned foreign languages there.

Subjectively, there's also a greater sense of nationalism in China. They want things "their way" to a certain extent. India seems to lack this (at least to a degree), possibly due to former British rule, or current relations with the US and the rest of the West. Compared to China, India is a ridiculously open society. The Chinese are much less exposed to Western influences.

In reverse: I read a story once about a Japanese businesswoman who wanted to open a business in America. She was inspired by Bridgestone (the tire company), named after the founder Shojiro Ishibashi (ishi = stone, bashi = bridge).

Her name was Kawakami; translating this into English she decided to name her company Up River.

I think it is deceiving to compare apples to oranges this way. Coca-cola is highly popular due to its branding across the board, not just the Chinese name they chose.

McDonalds is left out, but is just translated to 麦当劳 which sounds as close as possible to the syllables mac-don-alds (Màidāngláo). McDonalds is much more popular and prevalent in Asia than Subway, despite their 'worse' name that means nothing. The television commercials for McDonalds capitalize on the foreign nature of the company usually showing white people eating.

Seriously about usually showing white people in commercials? That's not what I see here, and I live in China right now. McDonald's and KFC, the two foreign fast food leaders, seem to have done a fairly good job localizing. Heck, I can't get any apple pies here, only pineapple and taro. And they serve chicken wings at McDonald's. Chicken wings! :) KFC goes one further, currently marketing a new Chinese BBQ pork set meal with rice and veggies.

Ha. Yep. And in Thailand they serve broccoli pies[1] and corn pies. Weird! :)

[1] http://a5.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc6/228089_101002...

This reminds me of a post I wrote a while back about McDonalds in Kuala Lumpur. 2 of their main combos were KFC style chicken.

http://troysimpson.co/branding-why-i-ate-mcdonalds-in-kuala-...

The McDonalds v. Subway battle is exactly the reason why Subway needs a clever name. With McDonalds and KFC dominating the Chinese fast food market, Subway needs a point of differentiation. Fortunately, both of the leaders had chosen mediocre names, which gives Subway a slight advantage.

You say McD is more popular in Asia than Subway.

Please bear in mind that Asia is larger than just China.

The "worse name" you mention here is only relevant to China and has no relevance to the rest of the Asian market.

I said it specifically to include other countries than China.

I was living in Taiwan for a while, which uses the same Mandarin name for McD.

And in other asian countries McD is far more popular than Subway.

I've always loved the Chinese naming for Coke. The article translates it as "delicious happiness," but it's actually more clever. The first two characters (ke kou) mean thirsty. The third character is the same as the first but means "can be" in the context. The fourth character (le) means happy. So all together, it literally means "[when you are] thirsty, [you] can be happy." As the other examples in the article show, it's quite easy to do the transliteration poorly, and a good one is far from inevitable. It's hard not to appreciate the amount of cleverness that went into "ke kou ke le".

可口 (kě kǒu) does actually mean "delicious" -- you are thinking of 口渴 (kǒu kě) which means thirsty

</nitpick>

Admittedly, it is still a superior branding to Pepsi (百事可乐) which literally translates to "hundred events." Maybe this has something to do with how Pepsi has about 1/3 as much market share as Coca-Cola has in China [1].

[1] http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011/07/29/coke-sees-chinas-mark...

<nitpick to your nitpick> 百事 could be translated as "hundred events" but could also just as easily be literally translated as "hundred things" which is much closer to its actual meaning: "everything" </nitpick>

Although by the number of promotional events that Pepsi puts on sponsoring concerts and such, I can very well see how "hundred events" may be closer to their actual marketing strategy. :)

My favorite part of this article is the comment from the guy who says "this sounds like it could be a business" and then links to a fully functional landing page he's already created to gauge interest in that type of business. He didn't waste any time.

EDIT: Here's his landing page. http://www.chinesebusinessname.com/

Haha yeah glad you liked it, but I wouldn't call it "fully functional" (although that image in the top left does say "chinese business name" in Chinese repeated over and over :)

I couldn't resist it and was pretty surprised the domain was available. Even a search for "chinese business name" in Google doesn't return many results so maybe I'll do something with it.

I submitted it to HN but I think it's sailed off the newest page and into oblivion.

I actually just had lunch at my local noodle joint and chatted with the guy there (who's native Chinese) and we played around with names for my CMS which is "Decal".

He doesn't have any special training other than being a native speaker but he was able to come up with a few ideas - he was pretty familiar with the concept.

Makes me think that actually my best strategy is just going to be to pretty up that landing page a bit (not too much though :) and just replace that "coming soon" form with a form that gets details about the business. My mate at the noodle place said he'd be happy to come up with some names. Start simple, iterate.

Then I could offer testing on each of the options via Mechanical Turk or something .... annnyhoo.

Baidu is given special state endorsements, permission to skirt copyright laws, network priority (it's not mysteriously blacked out half the time, because it plays well with the Communist Party), and allows the Chinese people to use something distinctly Chinese.

We don't need the world's most attenuated homophone to explain why Baidu is beating the pants off of Bing.

Just to add to the list, a few other good examples, all meeting the three criterion in the article:

Carrefour is translated as 家乐福(jia le fu), which means family, happiness and fortune. The supermarket chain's success was largely due to the name, 'cause many Chinese people actually think it is a Chinese company.

Pizza Hut as 必胜客(bi sheng ke), which means the winning one; although the name has not link to pizza or food, it helped to shape Pizza Hut as a premium brand.

BMW's brand identity(宝马, bao ma) is known as a prestigious horse; Mercedes-Benz's Chinese name 奔驰(ben chi) means gallop, running with speed, etc. So car manufacturers do have good tasted for their brand names.

Groupon' s newly picked name is 高朋(gao peng), which means classy friends. Also a clever choice.

----

One key trend in the name-picking game in the recent years is that more and more companies are trying to make their brands actually MEAN something. Earlier entrants like McDonald's, KFC, Disney, Nike, Adidas, they simply chose a few characters whose combination replicates the sound but is nevertheless meaningless. Why? Because more than a decade ago, having such a name automatically indicates you are a foreign brand, and this is a good thing. People were naturally drawn to such names, they believed foreign products stand for quality and premium experience. Also, early entrants are usually the first in its category to attack the Chinese market, giving them a monopoly position (sort of). For instance, KFC is known as 肯德基, whose brand image is not KFC itself but American Fast Food as a concept.

Yet companies who entered the market after 2000, all tried to attach some implied meaning to a name, or in some other words they all seek localization. The reasons things have changed are: firstly, more and more foreign brands entered the market, the monopoly benefits are no longer; in addition, a lot, I mean really a lot, of local Chinese brands try to mimic the strategy by crowning themselves a foreign title, which dilutes the whole foreign branding concept; finally, a growing number of English speaking population (especially the ones with considerable pocket size) demands difference, they are aware of Starbucks, but mostly remembers the brand as 星巴克, a clever enough translation.

With limited resources, and a tough enough time running startups to begin with, putting the burden of naming it something that adheres to Chinese culture in the off chance you expand there seems like a huge waste of effort and resources.

I know that many people think that because China has so many people that it must be a market you are in, but I would argue that focusing on the US market (if you are US based) probably makes far more sense. If you really get big in the US, you can try to go to other markets and you could name the company a chinese name and market it in china as a separate division. Most likely more would need to be changed than the name.

Look at the way Netflix has grown for example. I believe they are a shining example of doing it right at home, then focusing on international markets.

I generally agree with this. I think it's just a suggestion that it's worth thinking about if you're at all considering Chinese market entry, instead of assuming your name will just "work".

Robert, Good point. It is an important thing to think about if you enter the Chinese market.

Besides the business names, I am surprised to see all major operation systems don't have proper translations in chinese, including Microsoft windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It's hard to market these products to elder people.

Windows actually have great Chinese translations. They are not official, and some of them are really stupid (but funny!), e.g.:

Windows 3.2 -> Win32 -> 瘟32

Windows 95 -> Win95 -> 瘟95

Windows XP -> XP -> 叉屁

Windows 7 -> Win7 -> 瘟7

As long as Microsoft sticks with the pattern "Windows + something short", it's fine for most people to shorten it to just "win-something short".

Linux the term itself doesn't seem to have a translation, as most of Linux users seem to be able to pronounce the term in English (but they do fight over which way to pronounce the "i" sound). Various distros have official Chinese translations.

Mac OS X is the most stupid one to pronounce in Chinese, and many would pronounce the "X" as |eks|, not "ten". So many Mac users prefers to just say the "Apple operating system".

> Various distros have official Chinese translations.

  Debian -> 大便
  Ubuntu -> 俺不土
  Gentoo -> 真土

While I don't know about Chinese, in Japanese 大 means 'large' and 便 can be read as 'faeces'.

So perhaps the name for Debian in Chinese is actually "big poo".

Yep, just a joke people made to laugh at the pronunciation of Debian is the same as "big poo" in chinese, but we love Debian of course ;)

Bingo!

Here is a Chinese browser name:

Maxthon - 马桶

Debian... 哈哈哈!

> Windows actually have great Chinese translations. They are not official, and some of them are really stupid (but funny!)

Do you mind explaining what is stupid or funny about those translations for Windows? The abbreviated names are pretty standard in English. Do they mean something different in Chinese?

In Chinese, the win sound means plague... so you fill in the blank. Plague 95, Plague 98, Plague XP.

XP is even funnier, X is pronounced as "Cha" and it means to insert or to penetrate. P is pronounced as "P" which means asshole in Chinese. Again you fill in the blank.

More importantly, your business needs to be hard to copy.

There is nothing wrong with not having any meaning. I lived in China for 10 years, and frankly if it's American, the Chinese will buy it.

Chinese names and English names are completely incompatible, go with sounds over meaning, but be sure that if there is a meaning behind the sounds that they don't mean something ridiculous.

David translates to Da Wei which also means Large Toilet if you get the tones wrong...

Its tough finding a good name. I've done it twice with my own entities. Even if you don't need to worry so much about consumer branding, its hard to find something you like that is not taken...choices get rejected for being too similar with existing registrations.

I understand a name can be important, but the article lacks how to go about finding a good name. Even if you hear a phrase means something good, it may mean something else to another culture. How would a person go to finding out if a brand name sucks?

In my opinion, mygengo should have offered this as a service as well as ask for suggestions for their own Chinese name.

Also, don't forget the slogans, even if they are in English: http://www.i18nguy.com/translations.html

It's hard enough already to name product/company in English, considering trademark and hostname availability.

Should mygengo name themselves "买跟给"?

I like it. Sounds like the English name and means 'buy a lot' But as mygengo is a revolutionary translation service not a retail store.

On the other hand...finding a Chinese name really is a pill for all companies. This may be the best name yet.

They include the current version of 'Coca Cola' in Chinese: the brand included a description of their product within its name, calling itself 可口可乐 (kekoukele) — “delicious happiness”.

They leave out the original version of Coca Cola translated into Chinese: “bite the wax tadpole.” (Sorry, couldn't find a phonetic version.)

http://www.coca-colaconversations.com/my_weblog/2008/03/bite...

Seems a shame they left it out. I read it years ago and still remembered it well enough to google an example (though I was thinking "bite the toad"). It made quite the impression on me. It's an excellent example of how wrong this can go.

We thought about including it, but we couldn't really find a verifiable source that confirmed it — and a lot of people deny it as well.

This seems like an anecdote that non-Chinese tell, but I've never heard about it in Chinese, nor have I seen the Chinese characters. Can anyone verify this?

Snopes.com calls it "partially true": http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/tadpole.asp

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