For those foreigners or foreign companies setting up a Chinese business, that is, foreign run and owned, but starting it in China, the issue is often as easy as finding a good Chinese name. Sounds easy, but how well would that work?

Speaking specifically about a restaurant name, a friend of mine quite accurately commented:

If people are looking for a "Western" restaurant experience, that should also be reflected in the name. The contrary would be like going to a Chinese restaurant in Everytown, America called the Everytown Cafe or something. Another way to say it would be this: if your number one competitive advantage is a Western experience, you should make that point front and center in everything, including (and especially in) choice of name.

So, if we move to the other end of the spectrum in search of a foreign-sounding name, do we follow the pattern of just about every other foreign business out there and go ahead and transliterate, as closely as possible, a foreign name into Chinese? McDonald's becomes 'mai dang lao', KFC becomes 'ken de ji' (from "Kentucky"), and some two syllable words, like my home state of Texas, become four syllable brain teasers for Chinese people, 'de ke sa si'.

It may just be me, but I have a default dislike for transliterated names like that. It sounds like the foreign companies tried to read their name into Chinese like they would into every other language, but did not spend the time to realize how silly it sounds in Chinese. Again, though, that may just be me.

Yet another style: name translation. Instead of bringing across the sounds of the business name, the meaning is translated into Chinese. Starbucks, I have recently found (because we do not have them in our parts), is actually a half and half combination of transliteration and translation. The 'star' bit is translated to the Chinese word for star, and the bucks is transliterated into 'ba ke', for a final name of 'xing ba ke'.

Then, there are other variants like Google, which basically chose a transliterated name, something that sounded close ('gu ge') but was not totally random in Chinese. It actually makes sense, though not necessarily when applied to Google: "valley song". Most of the transliterated names choose Chinese characters for their sounds, but they seem to forget that each of those characters has its own individual meaning.

So, not that anybody actually thinks about it anymore, but McDonald's means something like "wheat now labor", or if you really stretch the meaning, "food right where you work". Or maybe if you do not pay attention, you will pick something like the first Chinese name I had, which sounded something close to my English name, but in Chinese reminded everybody of 'dead body'.

There are many resolutions to this issue, and there is no one answer to satify all the needs out there. Think it through one extra time when picking a name in Chinese, though.