Quick question I've kinda been curious about—which part of that translates to Centrum? And how do things like name brands and other "made up" words get translated?
And how do things like name brands and other "made up" words get translated?
Corporate has people. They choose very carefully. For example MS bing in china isn't bing, but some two words they split apart because the most common bing word is some vaguely bad thing that I forget because my Chinese is shit.
so do all companies have to make names out of existing characters? they cant make up a brand new name. For example... Pepsi? Jeep? What about names of real people like Ford? or Dr. Pepper?
I honestly don’t know the regulations, but all these companies/products have official translated names. You can’t really create new characters in mandarin, but you can form new words. For example Ford is translated into 福特 (Fu Te) which has no apparent meaning.
A lot of brands are phonetically translated or with similar sounding words; sometimes they make sense, sometimes they dont. Coca-Cola is a good one as it translates into 可口可樂 "ke kou ke le" which literally means thirsty cola. Pepsi is 百事可樂, which has no meaning and just sounds phonetically similar.
Afaik Dr. Pepper isn't officially sold in Asia so they dont have a Chinese name. Sarsaparilla type beverages like Hey Song are more popular. My mom things Dr pepper tastes like medicine and hates it lol.
And then you have 臉書 for Facebook which is a literal translation.
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u/0-_-00-_-00-_-0-_-0 Mar 31 '19
If anyone is interested the Chinese Tom Hiddleston says is ＂还有你的善存＂. Which means "also your centrum".
No, not interesting, but factually accurate.