Google Launch, Bad Linguistics ?
I was reading the article Google launches as ‘Valley Song’ in China the other day, and thought sounded a little strange.
So I asked a chinese colleague of mine. He said “Valley Song” has no meaning, in fact, the only similiarity is that the two chinese characters pronunciation is approximately that of “Google”. Looking at the Wikipedia article on Google, they mention it translates to “Song of the Harvest”. So which is it?
My colleague says they are bastardising a translation where none really exists.
It’s obviously difficult to translate a made up word to a foreign language which does not have the same alphabet. I guess those two characters give chinese speakers the best chance of pronouncing “Google”. Although, Google is pretty much a symbal in itself nowadays.
So did the article get it wrong ? Proabably .. the article was focused on chinese censorship and not really the name for the launch.
Interesting that people try to derive meaning where there possibly is none. In my opinion, they were just trying to represent the sound, and that’s it. So maybe they should have just said “Google launches in China ?”