Chinese Brand Name Translation Service

The Chinese translation of your brand name is of huge importance to any of your company’s Chinese marketing campaigns. A brand name must be easy to remember, it must properly represent your company’s image and it just has to resonate with the Chinese consumer. Given the vast differences between the Chinese and English languages, “translating” a brand name is no easy task. There are several methods for translating brand names so if you want your brand name professionally translated, it’s important to know what you are getting.

In a literal translation, the words in a brand name are directly translated into Chinese resulting in a semantically accurate translation but a translation that is usually far from perfect when it comes to building brand recognition and identification. In a phonetic translation, the sounds of the English words are transliterated, meaning the translated Chinese brand name will sound as close as possible to the English brand name. This method makes for a good start, but there are usually tens or hundreds of choices available, and choosing one blindly sometimes brings disastrous results. Another option is to create a completely new Chinese brand name. This is fine if your company plans to have a separate image in China, but there would be little synergy between your international and Chinese brands. There is simply no 'one-size-fits-all' approach for translating a brand name into Chinese.

We believe the most important part of translating a brand name is to maintain as much of the “spirit” of the brand as possible. The core aspects of the brand must be considered first and the words or sound of the brand can then be matched as closely as possible. We do this by very carefully considering the meaning of the English brand name, and then using a creative translation process to come up with the best Chinese brand name possible. We then provide you not only with one brand name, but with several potential brand names accompanied with a report on what each name means and how they compare to each other based on several metrics.

The Brand Translation Process

• We talk to you to better understand your English brand name. We look for a story or specific branding strategy behind the name. Together with you, we set the factors that will be used to guide the creative process and judge the final names.
• We come up with several different potential Chinese translations.
• We search online and perform a trademark search to eliminate Chinese brand names that are already trademarked in China or are otherwise already in use by a company in your industry.
• We discuss the remaining names and choose the best three to five names based on the meaning, sound and “feel” of the name.
• Optionally, we send out a survey to 10-100 Chinese consumers in our database and add that data to our report.
• We provide you with a report of the translated brand names along with our recommendations and an explanation of what the names mean and why we chose them. This report can be made short-and-sweet or as detailed as you like.
• Optionally, we provide a trademark registration service through our legal partner.

Need an excellent Chinese brand name? Contact us now.