Talk:Foreign branding

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Hello--The previous edit, by an anonymous contributor, claims that the use of an umlaut in IKEA's "unböring" is "linguistically justified."

Can someone make any sense of this? Are there, for instance, TV commercials for Ikea in which the ö is actually pronounced as a foreign-language vowel? Otherwise, it seems that the umlaut is no different from the "unjustified" one in Häagen-Dazs.

Opus33 22:13, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Reciprocity

I've cut this section:

There are a number of things (not necessarily goods) of exactly the same nature, that are called slightly differently in different countries.
Some notable (and amusing) examples:

because it's not about foreign branding. Perhaps it could be put in some other article? Is there a name for the "French toast"/"English horn"/"Russian roulette" phenomenon? Opus33 19:10, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I'd like to note that in spanish speaking countries, they are still called "russian mountains" (in fact they have no other widespread name) user:guruclef

[edit] Disputed

I have marked this "{{dubious}}" because of the statement about Greatest Hits Volume 2 and "mojijiramimiji". Here is the picture of the Greatest Hits Volume 2 cover I found:

If anyone knows the actual album with "モヂジラミミヂ" on it, thnplease edit the page. --65.43.150.150 20:56, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

Check out [1]. And please do a freaking google search before wasting anyone else's time. — Phil Welch 11:08, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Keyboards

"Japanese keyboards are marked with both romaji and hiragana letters. The Japanese letters in that meaningless string correspond to the romaji letters that are printed on the same keys on a Japanese keyboard."

This is kind of irrelevant/off topic?

As an explanation of how that Japanese text was sourced, it is very relevant. Most of these examples of foreign characters as branding are a result of imitating English letters using a foreign script. The origin of that Japanese text is very different, and comes from the keyboard layout, not any perceived similarity in the shape of the characters.

http://h30097.www3.hp.com/docs/base_doc/DOCUMENTATION/V51_HTML/SUPPDOCS/JAPANDOC/JAPAN19.GIF has an example of teh keyboard if you want to check for yourself.

Rhialto

Moji-jira mimi-ji sounds logical enough to me.. a whale made of hemp fibre and an old man known for his ears :D

[edit] npov

the last paragraph contains the line "is similarily abused" which seemed overly POV to me, i'll wait to see if anyone disagrees before changing it to something less POV.

I agree. I reworded it. —BenFrantzDale 12:30, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Fake Hindi

This happens in India as well, where english text is written in a sankrit-looking font characterized by a solid horizontal line, like this font: [2] Pimlottc 18:28, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Hagar the Horrible

  1. Scandinavian translations:In which Scandinavian countries is the "Hægar"/"Hägar" spelling used? Certainly not in Sweden, where the comic strip and its title character are renamed "Hagbard" (with no conspicuous foreign letters).
  2. "Hågar" spelling in English: I have never seen that particular spelling used in the comic strip, even though the "å" (a late addition to Scandinavian alphabets) looks Nordic enough to non-linguists. The only foreign-branding variant that Dik Browne used is "Hägar" with a faux umlaut; have his successors changed that practice?

--Ingeborg S. Nordén 15:36, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] makudonarudo

This isnt an example of this phenomenon. They write "McDonalds", and they write "マクドナルッド". They don't routinely write the direct English transliteration of that Japanese string (which would be "makudonaruddo". The Japanese isn't a creative spelling, it's a sincere attempt to reflect the English word in an alphabet that was never intended for such sounds. Unless someone can show an image of a restaurant with this English spelling, I suggest removing the entry. Rhialto 23:46, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

Why would it be makudonaruddo rather than makudonarudo? I can't imagine why the 'ru' part would be -held- when in fact it's supposed to be just the L in donald. If anything the 'direct english transliteration' would be makudonarudozu.

[edit] "Zhey"?

I think phonetic symbols should be used in the part of the article about faux-french pronunciation in english. Non-native english speakers find the english "ZH" sound very different to "J" in french, so this part of the article may not be understood by everyone. user:guruclef

Yeah, what he said (see below). I've fixed. — Coren (talk) 18:11, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Colloquial foreign branding through pronunciation

I've changed that section to use IPA, the ad-hoc pronunciation guide seemed to say the pronounciation was close to /tɑrˈzɛː/ instead of /tɑrˈʒɛː/, and that made little sense. Feel free to correct me if that really was it (but please do so in IPA, not everyone is a native english speaker, and even those that are have a hard time guessing at invented pronunciation guide styles).

Incidentally, this needs citing. Bad. — Coren (talk) 18:11, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

I went ahead and excised the section since nobody stepped up to source it (or, for that matter, to explain why it would be relevant at all). — Coren (talk) 02:12, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Ford Pinto

I've removed the anecdote related to the Ford Pinto; not only are those wrong-meaning-in-another-market story usually unverifiable and apocryphal, but they are quite unrelated to the topic of this article which is that of purposefully giving an "exotic" feel to a product sold on a local market for branding purposes, and not that of trying to sell a product on a foreign market under an accidentally inappropriate name. — Coren (talk) 19:19, 15 January 2008 (UTC)