Translation

Read the article in the papers over the weekend:
________________________
Lost in translation II

THE column in this space last week was entitled 'Lost in translation'. It was apt, for it turned out to apply to the writer as well.

I had written: 'When Coca-Cola first entered the Chinese market, it called its drink ke-kouke-la. Unfortunately, the Chinese characters the company chose for those phonetic sounds meant 'bite the wax tadpole' or 'female horse stuffed with wax'. Coca Cola scrambled when it discovered its mistake and came up with ko-kou-ko-le, meaning 'happiness in the mouth'.
Well, my sources turned out not to be altogether correct. A translation howler did occur, but it wasn't quite Coca-Cola's fault. And the company did settle upon a felicitous name, but the transliteration of that name in hanyupinyin is ke-kou-ke-le, not ko-kouko-le. The latter, it turns out, is a butchered version of the old Wade-Giles transliteration of the name - k'o-k'ou-k'o-le^. Those little ticks do matter. The apostrophe in k'o, for instance, signifies an aspirated sound, and without it, ko would be pronounced like the unaspirated ge in pinyin. Not knowing that, numerous sources have Coca-Cola known as kokou-ko-le in China. That looks like hanyu-pinyin, but isn't; is supposed to be Wade-Giles, but ain't.

Lost in translation, indeed! From English to Chinese to WadeGiles to Wade-Giles butchered to hanyu-pinyin to hanyu-pinyin misunderstood - it was enough to set my mind spinning. With the considerable help of two knowledgeable readers, Mr Phua Kok Heng and Mr Ian Lim, my senior colleague Mr Leslie Fong and my old teacher Professor Koh Tai Ann, I spent the better part of a week navigating the mysteries of the Chinese 'Coca-Cola'. Fiddling while Rome burns, one might say, but the mystery proved irresistible. The ke-kou-ke-le story, it turns out, is more interesting than I had imagined.

It began in 1928. Coca-Cola got a toehold in Shanghai and planned to penetrate the hinterland. But before it could, the Coca-Cola trademark had to be transliterated into Chinese characters.
The problem was there were about 200 Chinese characters, with a wide range of meanings, with sounds vaguely resembling Co-Ca-Co-La. While the company was sifting through them, Chinese shopkeepers, taking the initiative, put up their own signage, 'adopting any old group of characters that sounded remotely like 'Coca-Cola' without giving a thought as to the meaning of the characters used', reported H.F. Allman, a former legal counsel to Coca-Cola in China. Some of these signs adopted characters with bizarre meanings - 'tadpole biting wax', 'tadpole crunching wax tadpole', and what not, depending on the version of the story one reads. The howlers, according to Coca-Cola's official account, were the fault of the Chinese, not culturally ignorant Americans.

Other versions of the story have another Chinese, one Professor Jiang Yi, riding to the rescue. A well-known artist and poet, Prof Jiang was residing in Britain in the 1940s when he came up with ke-kou-ke-le in a competition. Some say he received a prize of £25 for his brain-wave, some say more. Whatever it was, Coca-Cola got a winner cheap. Branding experts nowadays would have charged much more - upwards of £250,000.

The characters corresponding to ke-kou-ke-le can be translated literally into English as 'can- mouth-can-happy' - or idiomatically in Chinese, ke-kou ('delicious') + ke-le ('enjoyable'). In Hokkien, the characters are pronounced approximately ko-kowko-luck; and in Cantonese, horhow-hor-lok.

The Coca-Cola example reveals the possible felicities, as well as pitfalls, in translating Western brand-names into Chinese. After all, the words 'Coca-Cola' do not evoke much in English. We know, in the dim recesses of our minds, that the drink is called thus because its recipe originally included coca leaves and kola nuts. But the fact that it may be 'the Real Thing' does not inhere in its name. Because Chinese is ideogramatic, it is possible to choose especially meaningful characters to convey the phonetic equivalents of English words. Thus, the Chinese 'Coca-Cola' can declare itself 'delicious' and 'enjoyable' - 'the Real Thing' - in its very name.

Many Western brands have exploited this capacity to produce felicitous results. Thus Mercedes-Benz is called ben chi in China, which means 'galloping swiftly'; BMW bao ma (for the first two letters of its initials), meaning 'treasured horse'; and Louis Vuitton lu yi wei deng, which suggests 'stepping up to the upper class'.

Even brands that have been unable to find phonetic equivalents for their names, have managed nevertheless to adopt felicitous Chinese names. Pepsi, for instance, is known as bai shi ke le, or 'hundred matters enjoyable'; and Nestle as que chao, or 'sparrow nest' - quite a coup, considering that 'Nestle' is a German surname meaning 'small nest'.

Companies do not always get so lucky. Consider Goldlion, the Hong Kong men's garments and accessories company. It was first known by the Chinese equivalent of 'Gold Lion'. In Cantonese, that is Kam See - which, unfortunately, sounds very much like the Cantonese words for 'gold loss', not at all an auspicious link. The company soon got itself a new Chinese name by splitting 'Goldlion' into three parts - 'Gold' (kam) + li ('profit' in Mandarin or lai in Cantonese) + 'on' (understood as 'come on' or lei in Cantonese). Thus, it became known as Kam Lai Lei in Cantonese (or Jin Li Lai in Mandarin), meaning 'gold and profit come'. Amazingly enough, they did.

Considering the lengths to which companies will go to find the correct Chinese transliterations of their brand names, it is understandable why Chinese Singaporeans were annoyed a couple of years ago when the Bayfront MRT station was initially called Bei Fu Lan. As this newspaper reported then, Bei Fu Lan didn't mean anything much, except that it sounded like 'Bayfront' mispronounced in English. Worse still, 'fu lan sounded like the Chinese word for decompose'. If Coca-Cola could have paid £25 to Prof Jiang to come up with ke-kouke-le, surely we could have paid somebody $250 to dig up something more lively than a decomposing body.

By the way, I've never asked anyone what my name in Chinese - Cha-Nah-Tha, I think it is - actually means. I fear discovering it means 'hanging toe nail' or something dreadful like that. If you do know what it means, DO NOT e-mail me unless it means something nice.
_____________________________

Have some silly translations that i just discovered. Pick ur brain & have a short brain-teaser.

1. 水上烟
2. 联合公园

Answers ready??
.
.
.
.

Stumped?
.
.
.
.
.

Pulling ur hair out at how annoying i am???
.
.
.
.

Ok, ok... before i get bashed... the answers (drum-roll...!!!!)

1. Smoke on Water (for the uninitiated, it's the anthem by Deep Purple)
2. Linkin' Park

bhwahh... it might just be better to just leave the names as it is & to perserve the dignity of the names, instead of shredding it to bits & leaving it for ridicule. *tsk*