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brento1138
Joined: 17 Nov 2004
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 Posted: Fri Jul 21, 2006 9:59 am Post subject: Bite the wax tadpole |
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I had never heard of this story before, how Coca-Cola tried to make their name with Chinese Characters... I found it interesting enough to post here.
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When Coca-Cola first entered the Chinese market in 1928, they had no official representation of their name in Mandarin. They needed to find four Chinese characters whose pronunciations approximated the sounds "ko-ka-ko-la" without producing a
nonsensical or adverse meaning when strung together as a written phrase. (Written Chinese employs about 40,000 different characters, of which about 200 are pronounced with sounds that could be used in forming the name "ko-ka-ko-la.") While Coca-Cola was searching for a satisfactory combination of symbols to represent their name, Chinese shopkeepers created signs that combined characters whose pronunciations formed the string "ko-ka-ko-la," but they did so with no regard for the meanings of the written phrases they formed in doing so. The character for wax, pronounced "la," was used in many of these signs, resulting in strings that sounded like "ko-ka-ko-la" when pronounced but conveyed nonsensical meanings such as "female horse fastened with wax," "wax-flattened mare," or "bite the wax tadpole" when read.
Coca-Cola had to avoid using many of the 200 symbols available for forming "ko-ka-ko-la" because of their meanings, including all of the characters pronounced "la." They compromised by opting for the character l�, meaning "joy," and approximately pronounced as "ler." The transliteration of the name 'Coca-Cola' they finally settled on used the following characters:
This representation literally translated as "to allow the mouth to be able to rejoice," but it acceptably represented the concept of "something palatable from which one receives pleasure." It was the real thing, with no wax tadpoles or female horses, and Coca-Cola registered it as its Chinese trademark in 1928.
...few companies can match Coca-Cola's amazing history of successfully adapting their product and marketing techniques to meet the demands of a wide variety of global markets.
Last updated: 5 April 1999
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Bit the wax tadpole! 
I do find it funny how they came up with the other phrase though...
http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/tadpole.asp
Coca-Cola: to allow the mouth to be able to rejoice |
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WorldWide
Joined: 28 Apr 2006
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| Posted: Fri Jul 21, 2006 10:23 am Post subject: |
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The Ford Pinto had terrible sales in South America before the Ford Company realized "Pinto" means small p e n i s in Spanish and Portugese slang.
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Guri Guy
Joined: 07 Sep 2003
Location: Bamboo Island
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| Posted: Fri Jul 21, 2006 11:17 am Post subject: |
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I heard that when the Mormons went to China they had to change their name because it literally translated to "Gates of Hell". Not good for gaining new members I suppose.  |
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DHX
Joined: 11 Jun 2006
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| Posted: Fri Jul 21, 2006 2:34 pm Post subject: |
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| Guri Guy wrote: |
| I heard that when the Mormons went to China they had to change their name because it literally translated to "Gates of Hell". Not good for gaining new members I suppose. |
http://www.lightplanet.com/mormons/response/qa/chinese.htm
From a Mormon website. Methinks he dost protest too much!
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Isn't it True that Mormon in Chinese means "Gates of Hell"?
Since "Mormon" is not a Chinese word, it doesn't meaning anything in Chinese. As I don't speak any Chinese dialects, I don't know whether the sounds used to make the word "Mormon" are close to any Chinese words or not. Even if they were, it would be a moot point because it would be a word that sounds like another word, not the word itself. Let me use a few English words to show my point:
Principle and Principal
Dessert and Desert
In both cases the words have a similar spelling and sound. Yet, they have totally different meanings. The Church does not claim to be the Church of the devil in any language. We are the true Church of Jesus Christ, personally restored to the earth by the resurrected Savior himself (See First Vision).
This gross misrepresentation can be heard in The God Makers movie and from anti-Mormons parroting the falsehood which it foisted upon them. Robert W. Blair, professor of linguistics at Brigham Young University, is one of several scholars who have answered that charge. He explained that in the Chinese language foreign words are converted into characters which, when read aloud, more or less approximate the sound of the foreign word. In the case of "Mormon", it is represented by two characters that closely approximate the English pronunciation of "Mormon."
The second symbol used for "Mormon" would mean "gate", "door", or "way" in the pure Chinese. Professor Blair said the same symbol would be used to represent the second syllable of the names Simon, Truman, Naumann, Gohrmun, or Seimen. The first symbol of "Mormon" could have been written with one or two syllables; depending upon the desired emphasis for the "R" sound. The two-syllable choice would have placed more of an accent on the R: "Mo(are)Men." Instead, the Church selected a symbol that reflects an "r-less accent" or "Mo-Men" sound.
In selecting a Chinese character to represent the first syllable of Mo-Men, almost any one of 30 Chinese characters that are read as "Mo" could have been chosen. Let us quote from Professor Blair's research:
The symbol that was actually selected is the character specifically used to represent a like sounding syllable in foreign words. When not used to render a meaningless syllable of a foreign word, this character suggests "smoothing something with the hand." (If one were to take this literal rendering seriously, one could explain "Mo-Men" as meaning "hand-smoothed Gateway, " or "way smoothed by hands." Further, interpolation might suggest that it was the bleeding hands of Jesus Christ that smoothed the way to Salvation!)
What the crafty enemies of the Restored Church have done is to pervert the facts in such a way that only those knowing Chinese can see their fraud. From the thirty characters which have been reading Mo, they substituted the one which means "devil" (and which is not the one used by the Church) and then propagated the lie that in Chinese the word "Mormon" means "Devil's gate," or "Gateway to Hell."
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Moldy Rutabaga
Joined: 01 Jul 2003
Location: Ansan, Korea
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| Posted: Fri Jul 21, 2006 5:37 pm Post subject: |
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I use a handout on funny translations in my classes for older adults, and they enjoy it a lot. Copy and use if your students are mature enough..
My last post for a month. Gone on holidays.. 
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The famous P.T Barnum once said, �Without promotion, something terrible happens, NOTHING!� But sometimes a careless translation can make an advertising campaign worse than having no promotion at all. Is it any wonder that we are in such a quandary about our ability to communicate?
Large companies have often found themselves in trouble via poor translations, Freudian slips, and the dirty minds of their customers! In Brazil, an American airline boasted that its planes had �rendezvous� lounges, not realizing that in Portuguese rendezvous means a place to have illicit sex. In French Canada, Hunt-Wesson promoted its �Big John� brand name of snack foods by translating it into French as �Gros Jos,� a colloquial French phrase for a woman with huge bre*sts (predictably for Quebec, they still sold well).
Names of cars are infamous for misunderstandings. When Chevrolet proudly took their car �Nova� to Latin America, they neglected the fact that no va means �doesn�t go� in Spanish. Sales, until people adjusted to the name, didn�t go. Neither did the Ford Pinto make a good impression in places where pinto is slang for tiny male t*sticles. Ford made a similar error with its �Fiera�, which means �ugly old woman� in Spanish. Other languages are not immune either; Kia Motors marketed its �Avella� at female drivers. Female drivers certainly responded; in dialect Korean, avella means �be careful about getting pregnant�.
Translation works best when inherent cultural meanings are taken into account. You just can�t risk creating a poor impression and expensive misunderstandings, yet many companies you�d think should know better have done so. Colgate introduced a toothpaste in France called Cue, the name of a notorious pornographic magazine. Coors translated the slogan �turn it loose� in such a way that it was understood as Spanish slang for �suffer from diarrhea.� Even a giant like Pepsi blundered with their slogan, �Come alive with Pepsi,� which translated in Taiwan into �Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave.� Eastern Air Lines� slogan, �We earn our wings every day� literally translated into Spanish, indicates that passengers will arrive at their destination as angels.
But lest anyone worry too much about being misunderstood, remember two things: it can happen to the best of people�many Germans still remember JFK for his famous speech in Berlin where he called himself a jelly doughnut (�ich bin ein Berliner� instead of �ich bin eine Berliner��I am a Berliner). Neil Armstrong told the world, �One small step for a man..�, but an electronic glitch made the a inaudible. Secondly, it happens in non-English countries too. So far, Mexican breadmaker �Bimbo� has yet to take off in America, where a �bimbo� is a beautiful but stupid woman. |
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Newbie
Joined: 07 Feb 2003
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| Posted: Fri Jul 21, 2006 5:40 pm Post subject: |
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| DHX -- hummer's are beautiful if you get a girl that knows what she's doing |
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