Naming in China

Mike Carr discusses the challenges of naming products or brands in China due to the vast linguistic differences between English and Mandarin, with Mandarin having over 50,000 characters compared to English's 26 letters. Translating English names into Mandarin requires careful consideration to avoid negative or confusing meanings, exemplified by Coca-Cola's initial Mandarin translation. Carr advises on the importance of checking for trademark infringement and considering social media handles, suggesting assistance from law firms like Hogan Lovells or thorough research. While current AI capabilities may not fully support Chinese naming, Carr sees potential for future advancements. 

Chapters

• 0:00 Naming Challenges
• 1:05 Transliteration and Translation
• 2:08 Trademark Considerations
• 3:06 Social Media Impact
• 4:01 AI's Role in Naming

Transcript

Mike (00:04):

Today we're going to talk about naming in China. So let's say you've got a product or a service or a personal brand, or you're social media influencer in the US and you're doing quite well and you're thinking about growing and expanding your brand. And maybe China's an opportunity for you. Why China's more than four times as big as the US market? So how hard could it really be to take that English name to China? Well, most Chinese don't even know what the English name is. They may speak Mandarin, which is arguably the most common language in China. And Mandarin has characters 26 characters in English. According to the great compendium of Chinese characters, there are over 50,000, 50,000 characters. If you're an educated Chinese person, you may only know about 8,000 characters. You don't know all 50,000. And if you need to be able to read a newspaper, it's about two to 3000 Mandarin characters.

(01:05):

So it isn't quite as complicated or involved as 50,000, but that's still a lot. So you need to first sort of take the English and then maybe transliterate it into the Mandarin that sounds closest to the English name. So when Coca-Cola went over there, that's what they did. That's exactly what they did. And it meant something that approximates a tadpole, that Nas wax not exactly ideal. So not only do you need to transliterate your English name into the Mandarin that approximates the sound, but then you need to translate that mandarin to make sure that it doesn't mean something bizarre like a tadpole that Nas wax. So Coca-Cola did that after they stubbed their toe. The new Coca-Cola Mandarin translated loosely into pleasant to the mouth gives joy. So you're done, right? You've gone through this translation, you've gone through the translation. No, you still need to look at trademark infringement, right?

(02:08):

So you need to say, okay, does the Mandarin sound like sound like another name that would be confusing to the Chinese consumer or your customer in the same class of goods and services? Likelihood, a trademark infringement? Does the translation translate into something that already is owned by a different company or a different product or a different service? And then what about social media habits? Let's say you're a TikTok influencer. Well, tadpoles that all wax is sort of cool and wacky and different. You might have a lot of followers. So lots of things to think about. We've come across a law firm, Hogan Laves, that's just excellent in this space. They have offices and attorneys. We've heard great things about them. They've been very responsive to some of our queries, and they've got some great content that would help in understanding how to go about naming.

(03:06):

Feel free to reach out to me, DM me, and I'll send you a couple PDF files that they've given us that really go into a lot more detail. But since this is all about ai, the overall title of our podcast and our YouTube is about naming in the AI world. How neat would it be to go to AI with this kind of a prompt? Here's my English name. I want you to transliterate it, transliterate it into the Mandarin characters that are phonetically the closest. It would sound the same. Then I want you to translate it and make sure that the meaning is appropriate for my brand. It conveys the kind of value, proper, the differentiation or the benefit that we provide. And if it doesn't, then I want you to find other Mandarin characters that sound maybe not quite as close, but still fairly close to my pronunciation of my English name, but has a great meaning.

(04:01):

Got it? Now, I want you to do a trademark search and make sure that that Mandarin character set or that translation doesn't conflict with any existing intellectual property in China. And by the way, we need some social media handles and we need a URL. So I need you AI to go out there and give me all this stuff. Now we do research in this area a lot and AI can't quite deliver on all those things yet, but we think it's coming soon. So if you need a Chinese name right now, AI's not going to get you there and you'll have to go through some of the other things I talked about. But you just wait in the not too distant future. That kind of prompt may give you a great name to go forward with when you're ready to roll out into China.