Thorsten Pattberg: Zero Translation – Chinese Names, Companies, and Brands (Global China)

“If you think about Chinese company names and brands such as 微波 Weibo, 百度 Baidu, 海尔 Hai’er, the 以崚药业 Yiling Group, the 大商集团 Dashang Group, 华联集团 Hualian Group (it’s a supermarket chain), and 上海滩 Shanghai Tang, etc., these are all Chinese brand names. What they do is they opt for a ‘second’ -a [transliterated] English name…”

Thorsten Pattberg (D.Litt.) is the author of (China’s Foreign Language Press, 2013) and the forthcoming Knowledge is a Polyglot — The Future of Global Language (Hanban/Foreign Language Press, 2014). He can be reached at .