Bada BING MS and way ahead of the WAVE Google: what’s in a brand name, Chinese-style
The last two days have seen the announcements of MSFT’s new Bing search platform as well as the to-be-launched Google Wave:
TechCrunch’s MG Siegler decided to make a joke out of MSFT’s choice of brand name:
and this has been followed by all manner of inaccurate (but quite amusing) threads by people attempting to translate and discern what the word “bing” means. According to the TC post it’s “death”.
Fortunately, one commentator does note:
“According to Dr. Qi Lu, who thought about going back to live in his native China before accepting Steve Ballmer’s offer to head up Microsoft’s search effort, Bing means something a little more positive in Chinese:
“Bing” also resonates with an audience Google is yet to dominate: China.
“The actual Chinese characters are two characters, ‘Bi’ and ‘Ying’ and combined these two characters mean ‘very certain to respond’ and ‘very certain to answer’,” Dr Lu said.
“That’s a terrific representation of what our brand stands for in the Chinese language.””
For me, MSFT marketing has made the mistake of thinking they can compound two Chinese characters 必 应 “bi-ying” and anglicize them into BING — as in Chandler Bing from Friends and the Soprano’s “bada bing” — and not double-checking whether the hybrid loses something in the re-translation. One of the homophonic translations of “bing” is indeed “disease”. However there are the other translations; it all depends on the tone for the letter i in the word. Like the French language, Chinese has acute, grave, bass and double acute accents (ì, í, ī, etc.). The difference is that in French the accents are used purely for pronunciation assistance whilst in Chinese the accent completely determines the word, its pronunciation tones and its meanings.
Here are some possible meanings for “bing”:
http://www.nciku.com/search/all/pinyin/bing
Incidentally, a TC commentator provided the link to translations for “ping” instead of “ding” (and this is why our brain cells are dying and academic research says we’re only using 10 percent of our intelligence — LOL!).
Instead of jumping straight to the “disease” translation, TC’s journalist could have opted for the version of bing which means “ice” and “consult” so the word’s English connotations with search would be “cool consult”.
As for the commentator on that TC thread who says Google’s Wave in Chinese sounds and translates as “death” 危 ……….NOWHERE does that word appear on nciku online for the Chinese translation of “wave”:
http://www.nciku.com/search/all/wave
Actually the only constituents of the character for “wave”, 波浪 are: water, ball and cool. This is appropriate since waves in Chinese are envisioned as ball curls over cool water, so Google’s WAVE loses less kinetic energy and power in translation than MSFT’s BING, that’s for sure.
Also, as you can see in my explanations, Chinese people think poetically, harmonically and in natural Zen because it’s incorporated in the structure of our language (written characters, homophonic pronunciations and radicals replacements etc.) itself!
Anyone lucky enough to be multi-lingual would fall about laughing all the time at the intentional and unintentional double entendres and lost in translations of all sorts of brand names and other popular terms. Previously, I’ve tried to explain that a bridegroom was getting “cold feet” to my mother — not to marrying me, btw, but in the US comedy film, The Bachelor. She said the guy should simply put on some socks!!!
That’s an example of lost in translation……….LOL.
Tags: bada bing, branding, Chinese characters, Google Wave, lost in translation, MSFT Bing, nciku
