Transliteration of Coca-Cola

Trademark to Chinese Characters

The introduction of Coca-Cola in China
back in 1928 presented some unusual
problems
• The potential market was the 500 million Chinese
• For ages the Chinese had been accustomed to
drinking their own delightful green tea - hot and
straight
• No official representation of its name in Mandarin
• 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
Looking for Chinese equivalent for Coca-Cola

AIM: Find four Chinese characters whose

pronunciations approximated the sounds “ko-
ka-ko-la” without producing a nonsensical or
adverse meaning when strung together as a
written phrase. This was not an easy topic
considering that
Out of the 40,000 or so
characters there are only about 200 that are
pronounced with the sounds coca-cola
needed and many of these had to be avoided
because of their meaning.
While Coca-Cola was searching for the four
characters a number of shopkeepers had also
been looking for Chinese equivalents for “Coca-
Cola”
They adopted any old group of characters that
sounded remotely like "Coca-Cola" without
giving a thought as to the meaning of the
characters used.
These home made signs sounded like
"Coca-Cola" when pronounced but the
meaning of the characters came out
something like:
1.Female horse stuffed with wax
2. Bite the wax tad pole
3.A thirsty mouthful of candle wax
 THE SOLUTION
• Coca-cola had to avoid using many of the 200
symbols available for forming “ko-ka-ko-la”
because of their meanings , including all of the
characters pronounced “la”(=wax)
• Finally, they decided to use the character “le” ,
instead of “la”. “Le” means joy and is pronounced
as “ler”.
 ( (Ke3kou3) stands for tasty; good to
eat; palatable.

(Ke3le4) = be happy.

This can be translated as “tasty and happy”

or “happiness on the mouth”
The meaning in Chinese is absolutely positive
  PepsiCo followed the Coca-Cola trend.

Bai3 Shi4 Ke3 Le4.

(Bai3) means hundred; numerous.

(Shi4) stands for thing; matter; affair; post;
business, etc.
Thus the Chinese trademark for Pepsi-Cola may
mean ‘be happy with everything ’!