The worst (and best) Chinese names for foreign tech companies

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

Juliet’s famous line from Romeo and Juliet is often invoked to suggest that at the end of the day, names don’t really matter. Of course, at the end of the play, Juliet and Romeo both died tragically, so I’m not sure we should be taking advice from either of them. I guess names really do matter.

That’s certainly true in China, and coming up with a Chinese name for your company can be one of the toughest tasks a tech firm faces when it’s time to localize. But how can you translate your brand into a language and culture that’s so different? If you transliterate (imitate the sounds of your name), you could end up with characters that sound like your brand but mean something awful. And if you try to translate directly, you could end up with a name that’s culturally incomprehensible or unlikely to be associated with your brand.

If you don’t translate at all? Well, that can come with problems of its own. Let’s take a look at a few examples:

Bad names

Google

Chinese name: Guge 谷歌

Why it’s bad: While Guge does sound vaguely like Google, the characters’ meanings don’t work well. Literally, the name means something like “harvesting song” or “grain song,” and it sounds more like the name of a folk tune than the name of a giant search company. It certainly doesn’t hold up well in comparison to Baidu, whose name is a clever reference to a piece of ancient Chinese poetry. In fact, when the Guge name was first announced, some Chinese internet users actually protested, fearing that the name would harm Google’s “cool factor” in China.

Bing

Chinese name: Biying 必应

Why it’s bad: Bing’s official Chinese name, biying, actually isn’t bad: it means “must respond” and it’s a pretty clever name for a search engine. Unfortunately for Microsoft, the search engine’s Chinese URL still uses the “Bing” branding and that reads like bing 病, the Chinese word for disease. In a culture that values the auspicious, it’s one of the least auspicious names one could have.

Best Buy

Chinese name: Baisimai 百思买

Better names: