Subject: Female horse fastened with wax Date: 15 Jun 1993 18:28:54 -0500 The Coca-Cola Com

From: VACSC00C@VAX.CSUN.EDU (snopes)
Subject: Female horse fastened with wax
Date: 15 Jun 1993 18:28:54 -0500

  The Coca-Cola Company was kind enough to send me material from their archives 
concerning their attempts to translate the Coca-Cola name into Chinese.  A few 
things to bear in mind concerning this UL:

   1)  The story concerning the alleged mistransliteration of "Coca-Cola"
       into Chinese is not, as many people believe, of recent origin.  
       Coca-Cola first started marketing their product in (mainland) China in 
       the 1920's.

   2)  Coca-Cola never actually marketed their product in China using a 
       trademark that translated into some bizarre expression in Chinese.
       Such translations were suggested by others, but were not used.

   3)  It is the meaning of the Chinese characters being used to spell out
       a phonetic phrase that is of importance to this topic, not the meaning
       of the spoken phrase "ko-ka-ko-la"


   The article below is from the June 1957 issue of "Coca-Cola Overseas", a
Coca-Cola Company in-house publication.  I obviously can't reproduce the
Chinese characters that illustrate the article here, so I've done the best
I can otherwise:


        Transliteration of Coca-Cola Trademark to Chinese Characters

           by H.F. Allman, formerly Legal Counsel in China for 
                          The Coca-Cola Company 


     The introduction of Coca-Cola in China back in 1928 presented some unusual 
problems to the late P.S. ("Red") Lewis and associates.  The potential market 
was the 500 million Chinese, or a reasonable number thereof, and the large 
foreign community in China.  For ages the Chinese had been accustomed to 
drinking their own delightful green tea -- hot and straight.  The social 
customs of the foreign communities had long been set by the British -- and who 
had ever heard of any Colonial Britisher drinking anything but Scotch, gin, or 
black tea?
     "Red" had no delusions that all of these people would suddenly become 
customers for Coca-Cola.  Nevertheless, he firmly believed that an 
ever-increasing number of Chinese would come to like Coca-Cola and -- he was 
right.  Before long, Coca-Cola appeared at the Shanghai Club and the Country 
Club, both utter British strongholds but frequented by Americans in the 
community.  They convinced the British that Coca-Cola was indeed delicious and 
refreshing.
     It was obvious that the Coca-Cola trademark had to be transliterated into 
Chinese characters in order to reach the millions in the market.  Chinese, both 
written and spoken, is so completely alien to any European language that the 
simplest foreign word or term is a tongue twister to the Chinese.
     To find the nearest phonetic equivalent to Coca-Cola required a separate 
Chinese character for each of the four syllables.  Out of the 40,000 or so 
characters there are only about 200 that are pronounced with the sounds we 
needed and many of these had to be avoided because of their meaning.
     While doing the research for four suitable characters we found that a 
number of shopkeepers had also been looking for Chinese equivalents for 
"Coca-Cola" but with weird results.  Some had made crude signs that were absurd 
in the extreme, adopting any old group of characters that sounded remotely like 
"Coca-Cola" without giving a thought as to the meaning of the characters used.  
One of these homemade signs sounded like "Coca-Cola" when pronounced but the 
meaning of the characters came out something like "female horse fastened with 
wax" and another "bite the wax tadpole".  The character for wax, pronounced La, 
appeared in both signs because that was the sound these untutored sign makers 
were looking for.  Any Chinese reading the signs would recognize them as a 
crude attempt to make up an arbitrary phonetic combination.
     Although we were primarily concerned with the phonetic equivalent of 
"Coca-Cola", we could not ignore the meaning of the characters, individually 
and collectively, as the free-wheeling sign makers had done.  The closet 
Mandarin equivalent to "Coca-Cola" we could find was K'o K'ou K'o Le^.  The 
aspirates (designated by ') are necessary to approximate the English sounds.  
There is no suitable character pronounced La in Chinese so we compromised on 
Le^ (joy) which is approximately pronounced ler.  We chose the Mandarin because 
this dialect is spoken by the great majority of Chinese.
     Incidentally, Chinese has to be interpreted into English rather than 
translated, and vice versa.  All Chinese characters have more than one meaning 
but the [four chosen] (depending on context) commonly mean:

   K'o  = To permit, be able, may, can

   K'ou = Mouth, hole, pass, harbor

   K'o  = as above

   Le^  = Joy, to rejoice, to laugh, to be happy

     It would seem that the Chinese trademark means to permit mouth to be able 
to rejoice -- or something palatable from which one derives pleasure.  Not once 
in ten million times could a company literally pronounce their trademark in 
English and have the sounds mean something desirable in the Chinese language.
     The mainland of China is out of the market indefinitely but fortunately 
most of the 2,000,000 Chinese in Hong Kong and the 9,000,000 in Taiwan under-
stand Mandarin.  Even the 10,000,000 overseas Chinese, who mostly speak 
Cantonese or Fukienese, realize that K'o K'ou K'o Le^ is the Mandarin Chinese 
trademark for "Coca-Cola".

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