Radiant Mermaid Girl Coffee
JD and I have been having a recurring conversation about how the signs for non-Chinese businesses get translated or transliterated in Chinatown. The prime example is Starbucks. They have a huge green sign in Chinese, and the both of us were like "what does that say?" We were amusing ourselves trying to come up with possibilities like Radiant Mermaid Girl Coffee, or Coffee of the Fish Woman. So I took down the characters and went plowing through my Kanji lookup book and only found the first word out of five. In Japanese it's "Hoshi" meaning Star. So, I was like, oh, maybe they are going for something literal like Star Stag or Star Money or something like that. Well, I couldn't find the rest of them in a Kanji lookup book so I went to a Chinese lookup book. Turns out the remaining four characters are all transliterations. So it's "Star"-Ba-Ke Ka-Fei in Chinese. Here's how it broke down:
Star
ba = An open hand, to hope for
ke = To conquer
Ka-Fei = (indicative of a loan word) specifically the word for Coffee, Similar characters to "to Increase" and "To be wrong." Though the final character is not exactly "to be wrong" since it includes a long box on the left.
It all seems very positive. Though the opening three characters (Star Conquering Hand) make me think of Fist of the North Star. And oh GOD would I drink Fist of the North Star coffee.
So I decided to play around with my own name in the kanji lookup book and went through the syllabary to find things that worked phonetically that looked cool. I went with Eiri-Ku Rai-Ri. Here's how it breaks down
Eiri = Profit or Lucre
Ku = Phrase or Haiku
Rai = To bring forth, To Come
Ri = Logic
If I inverted my name so that I had family name first, as is customary with Japanese naming conventions. I would be The Logic Inducing Profitable Poem. Not bad. And kind of oddly accurate.
Addendum: JD and I were also talking about the Coca Cola urban legend of translating their brand name into Chinese as "Bite the wax tadpole." Well, it seems that it's not quite true, but kinda true. The full story is over at Snopes.
Star
ba = An open hand, to hope for
ke = To conquer
Ka-Fei = (indicative of a loan word) specifically the word for Coffee, Similar characters to "to Increase" and "To be wrong." Though the final character is not exactly "to be wrong" since it includes a long box on the left.
It all seems very positive. Though the opening three characters (Star Conquering Hand) make me think of Fist of the North Star. And oh GOD would I drink Fist of the North Star coffee.
So I decided to play around with my own name in the kanji lookup book and went through the syllabary to find things that worked phonetically that looked cool. I went with Eiri-Ku Rai-Ri. Here's how it breaks down
Eiri = Profit or Lucre
Ku = Phrase or Haiku
Rai = To bring forth, To Come
Ri = Logic
If I inverted my name so that I had family name first, as is customary with Japanese naming conventions. I would be The Logic Inducing Profitable Poem. Not bad. And kind of oddly accurate.
Addendum: JD and I were also talking about the Coca Cola urban legend of translating their brand name into Chinese as "Bite the wax tadpole." Well, it seems that it's not quite true, but kinda true. The full story is over at Snopes.