I'll have a tadpole please!

We do a lot of cross-cultural work and the use of language is always a critical element when formulating international campaigns and so we were particularly interested in this story of Coca Cola...and how Coca-Cola when translated into Chinese means “bite the wax tadpole!"

When Coca-Cola was first sold in China in 1927, it was obvious to the Coke employees in China that the Coca-Cola trademark must be transliterated into Chinese characters. 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 were only about 200 that were pronounced with the sounds the Company needed, and many of these had to be avoided because of their meaning.

While doing the research for four suitable characters, the employees found that a number of shopkeepers had also been looking for Chinese equivalents for Coca-Cola, but with strange results. Some had made signs that were absurd, adopting any group of characters that sounded remotely like "Coca-Cola" - one of these homemade signs sounded like “Coca-Cola” when pronounced, but the meaning of the characters came out as “female horse fastened with wax” and another meant “bite the wax tadpole.”

Although the Company was primarily concerned with the phonetic equivalent of Coca-Cola, the employees could not ignore the meaning of the characters, individually and collectively – even if the shopkeepers had done so. They chose Mandarin because this dialect was spoken by the great majority of Chinese. The closest Mandarin equivalent to Coca-Cola was “K'o K'ou K'o Lê.”

All Chinese characters have more than one meaning, but K'o K'ou K'o Lê (depending on context) commonly meant “to permit mouth to be able to rejoice” - catchy!