Brands in China translate into good business

Art "is only a very, very tiny piece of it," said Vladimir Djurovic, president of Shanghai's Labbrand Consulting, which has made a business of finding names for Western companies entering the Chinese market.

"Do you want to translate your name, or come up with a Chinese brand?" said Monica Lee, managing director of The Brand Union, a Beijing consultant. "If you go for phonetic sounds, everyone knows where you are from; you're suddenly identified as a foreign brand."

For some products, having a foreign-sounding name lends a cachet that a true Chinese name would lack. Many upscale brands just as Cadillac, or Hilton, employ phonetic translations that mean nothing in Chinese. Rolls-Royce includes two Chinese characters for "labor" and "plants" that after a fashion have become standard usage in foreign names, all to achieve a distinct foreign look and sound.

The other hand

On the other hand, a genuine Chinese name can say things about a product that a mere collection of homonyms never could. Take Citibank, Hua qi yinhang, which word for word means "star-spangled banner bank," or Marriott, Wan hao, or "10,000 wealthy elites." Or Pentium, Ben teng, which means "galloping." Asked to introduce Marvel comics to China, the Labbrand consultants came up not long ago with "Man wei" — in broad outline phonetic, foreign-sounding and eminently suited to superheroes with the meaning "comic power."

Why some Chinese words are so freighted with emotion is anyone's guess. Denise Sabet, vice general manager at Labbrand, suggests the reasons include cultural differences and the Chinese reliance on characters for words, or rather than a phonetic alphabet. Each character is a collection of drawings that can carry meanings all their own.