A product on a Chinese shelf is competing on its name, its pack copy and about two seconds of attention — which makes it the clearest possible demonstration that a brand’s words are part of the product rather than a wrapper around it.
Red Bull is the example this post has always used, and it remains a useful one because the brand’s positioning is so specific: it sells a feeling rather than an ingredient list. We have never worked with Red Bull and have no insight into its internal decisions. What the example shows is public — a global brand that is recognisably itself in a market with entirely different retail conventions.
What follows is what actually has to be decided when a brand enters the Chinese market, drawn from our own work for Chinese-market content rather than from anybody else’s campaigns.
Key Takeaways
- A Chinese brand name is a creative decision with permanent consequences, and it is made once.
Sound, meaning and the characters chosen all carry weight simultaneously. - “Chinese” is not one deliverable. Simplified Chinese for the mainland and
Traditional Chinese for Taiwan and Hong Kong are different written languages. - Retail and travel content for Chinese audiences has to work on the platforms that audience
actually uses, which is a research question before it is a writing one.
We define transcreation as “creative translation”, a process that adapts the emotional expressions and contextual relevance of the source message that goes beyond literal meaning of words. Four things have to arrive together for it to work: language, emotion, culture and your brand’s tone of voice.
Why a Chinese brand name is a different problem
Chinese characters carry sound and meaning at the same time, so a name has to be solved on both axes at once.
A transliteration that reproduces the sound may produce characters whose combined meaning is neutral at best. A translation of the meaning may produce something unpronounceable or unrelated to the global brand. The names that work usually do both — approximating the sound while assembling characters that say something the brand is happy to be associated with.
Two further constraints make this a decision rather than a task. It is effectively permanent: once customers, retailers and regulators know a brand by a name, changing it means starting again. And it has to survive being spoken, written by hand, typed, searched for and read at a distance on a shelf.
This is the clearest case of transcreation as writing rather than conversion, and it is why naming work is briefed on intent rather than on text. More on how that latitude is bounded is in creativity and emotion in transcreation.
One market, more than one language
The most common and most avoidable error in Chinese-market work is buying ‘Chinese’.
| Deliverable | Serves | Why it is separate |
|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese (China) | Mainland China | The baseline for mainland retail, search and social |
| Simplified Chinese (Singapore, Malaysia) | Chinese readers in Southeast Asia | Shared script, different vocabulary and usage conventions |
| Traditional Chinese (Taiwan) | Taiwan | Different script and different vocabulary; not a conversion of the Simplified text |
| Traditional Chinese (Hong Kong) | Hong Kong | Different again, with its own usage and a different relationship to English |
Our working list distinguishes all four, which is a scoping fact rather than a boast: it means the question “which Chinese?” gets asked at the brief stage. The hotel version of this argument is in Mandarin translation for hotels.
Retail copy in two seconds
Shelf and marketplace copy is short copy, and short copy is where literal rendering does the most visible damage.
- The name and the descriptor do most of the work, and both are fixed-space creative decisions.
- Pack claims are regulated statements and are rendered exactly, then checked locally. This is not the place for latitude.
- Category conventions differ: what a shopper expects to see stated, and in what order, is a local norm rather than a brand choice.
- Print reality. Chinese text occupies different space from English, so pack and point-of-sale artwork has to be proofed in position rather than approved as a document.
The general retail treatment is in transcreation in retail and lifestyle and the print and in-store estate in packaging and in-store copy.
Reaching the audience, not just the language
Content for Chinese audiences has to live where that audience is, and that is a research question.
When we took Changi Airport Group’s web content and literature from English into Simplified Chinese, won through a government public tender, our Shanghai editorial team researched the travel apps Chinese travellers actually use, and we reviewed the client’s existing Chinese content as part of the work. The research is the part that makes the writing land; without it you produce accurate Chinese aimed at a reading habit the audience does not have.
Our authority on this subject is our own publication, An Insider’s Perspective on Marketing to China’s Outbound Travellers, published in November 2018. Its market data is 2018-era and we treat it as such, but the structural observations about how this audience researches and books still inform how we scope Chinese-market work. The current treatment is in Chinese-market hotel marketing.
How the work runs
A supplier that can name its steps can tell you which one you are in. Ours runs in six:
- Understand the Project Brief. The content, the markets, the purpose and the constraints.
- Pre-Transcreation Study. Reviewing brand materials, style and tone, and uncovering the market-specific technical jargon and colloquial terms the content will need.
- Transcreation. The writing, drawing on the Translation Memory built for your brand.
- Client Review. Your own market teams read the content before it is live.
- Update and Approval. Revisions, then sign-off.
- Final Delivery. Into the system it has to live in, or as artwork ready to print.
What we can evidence
Chinese-market content delivered for an airport, hotel groups and an app.
- For Changi Airport Group we won a government public tender to take web content and literature from English into Simplified Chinese for Chinese leisure and business travellers. Our Shanghai editorial team researched the travel apps those travellers actually use, and we reviewed the client’s existing Chinese content as part of the work.
- For Far East Hospitality we are an appointed language service provider, handling Sitecore websites and CRM content — in-room directories, sales brochures and fact sheets — in Simplified Chinese, Bahasa Indonesia and Japanese for the China, Indonesia and Japan markets.
- For Millennium Hotels & Resorts we are an appointed language service provider, producing brand content for China, Taiwan, Japan, the UAE, Spain, Italy and France on Sitecore, with quality assurance before go-live.
- For COMO Hotels & Resorts we localised website content into 7 languages — Arabic, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Russian and Spanish — publishing into the Drupal back end alongside the client’s digital agency, and extended the programme to CRM content, in-room directories, spa and F&B menus and press releases.
- For FWD, the Omne app was localised into 7 Asian languages — Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese for Hong Kong, Japanese, Vietnamese, Khmer, Thai and Bahasa Indonesia — integrated into the app’s content management system and checked linguistically so that every market could launch simultaneously across APAC.
At IPPWORLD, we are an award-winning transcreation agency that specialises in creative translation and marketing localisation for the hospitality, travel, lifestyle and retail sectors. The award is Best Hospitality Creative Translation & Localisation Agency 2019, at the LUXlife Hospitality Awards. We have worked in this field since 1994, from Singapore, with an editorial team in Shanghai, and we work in 30 languages — 18 Asian, 10 European and 2 Middle Eastern.
Conclusion
Standing out on a Chinese shelf, or in a Chinese search result, is not a translation outcome. It is the result of decisions taken before any copy exists: which written language, what the brand is called, which claims are fixed, and where the audience will encounter the content.
Brands that make those decisions deliberately end up with Chinese-market content that reads as though it belongs there. Brands that buy “Chinese translation” end up with accurate copy and an unexplained performance gap.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did IPPWORLD work on Red Bull’s Chinese marketing?
Is Simplified Chinese enough for the Chinese market?
How is a Chinese brand name created?
Should product claims be adapted for the Chinese market?
What is different about marketing to Chinese travellers?
Tell us which Chinese markets you are selling into and we will tell you which written languages that implies and what has to be decided before any copy is written. More on the service is on our marketing localisation and marketing translation pages. Related reading: Chinese-market hotel marketing, Mandarin translation for hotels, transcreation in retail and lifestyle and creativity and emotion in transcreation.