Sunday update: Oddball Chinese versions of Western names

I mentioned earlier that I had a hard time asking people in Shanghai where the gigantic Carrefour store might be, because — silly me! — I hadn’t guessed that the name would be phoneticized into Mandarin as jia le fu. Once I finally saw the Chinese characters I realized how they should be pronounced, but by that time I was standing in front of the store.

In his interesting blog from Kunming, American Matt Schiavenza discusses the general phenomenon of phoneticized names — and offers one hypothesis for why names in Mandarin bear so little resemblance to the Western term they supposedly represent. Many big Western companies, he points out, came to Hong Kong before they came to mainland China. There they were given Chinese names that, as pronounced in Cantonese, made some sense. McDonald’s, for instance, is known by the characters 麦