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Choosing a Chinese name

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Guest contributor
Wednesday 21 July 2010
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The picture shows one of many eye-opening labels recorded in Nick Bartman's recent series on Chinese fakery. Not that Cher Lim's article below is about fakes, but it does show how important names and imagery are in the Chinese market – JR

When I first wrote about wine in Chinese some five years ago, I was struck by the numerous versions of translated names used by merchants or writers in the region. Most of these names are merely phonetic translations with little or no meanings attached to the words. Some translations are so bad that it is better to...