Blog

Coca-Cola Once Had the Worst Chinese Name in History. A Newspaper Contest Fixed It.

In the 1920s, Coca-Cola began entering the Chinese market. Someone — we do not know who — produced the first phonetic Chinese transliteration of the brand name:

蝌蚪啃蜡 — Kēdǒu kěn là

Tadpole Gnawing Wax.

The sounds were approximately right. The meaning was a sensory catastrophe. Tadpoles are associated in Chinese culture with transformation and fertility — but also with the murky, unsettling phase between forms. Wax is cold, tasteless, artificial. "Tadpole Gnawing Wax" describes a drink that is unpleasant, strange, and probably inedible.

Coca-Cola, to its credit, recognised the problem immediately. The company placed an advertisement in Chinese newspapers offering a prize for a better name. Hundreds of entries arrived.

The winner was submitted by a professor at the University of London named Jiang Yi:

可口可乐 — Kěkǒu kělè

"Delicious and joyful." Or more literally: "can-mouth can-happy" — the kind of name that makes you feel good before you have understood what it means. Four characters, two tones, perfectly balanced, phonetically close to the English original, and independently beautiful in Chinese.

It is still the brand's name today.

What makes 可口可乐 a masterpiece of Chinese naming

Linguists and brand consultants have analysed this translation for a century, and the consensus is consistent: it succeeds because it operates on three levels simultaneously.

1. Phonetic fidelity: Kěkǒu kělè is close enough to "Coca-Cola" that hearing one calls up the other. The foreign brand identity is not lost.
2. Semantic independence: the name works in Chinese without any knowledge of the English original. A Chinese speaker who had never heard of Coca-Cola would encounter a name meaning "delicious and joyful" and find nothing strange about it.
3. Tonal beauty: 可 (kě, third tone) — 口 (kǒu, third tone) — 可 (kě, third tone) — 乐 (lè, fourth tone). The three descending-then-rising tones followed by a clean fall create a satisfying spoken rhythm. It sounds like a product that refreshes.

The lesson for Chinese personal naming

Most Western parents choosing a Chinese name for a child face a version of the same problem Coca-Cola faced in 1920: how do you transliterate a foreign sound into Chinese characters without producing "Tadpole Gnawing Wax"?

The answer is the same one Jiang Yi gave: stop trying to transliterate and start trying to translate. Find the meaning in the original name — or the meaning you want to give the child — and find Chinese characters that carry that meaning beautifully. Let the phonetics follow where they can; let meaning lead where they cannot.

A child named "Emma" does not need a Chinese name that sounds like Emma. She needs a Chinese name that carries something of Emma's spirit — elegance, universality, grace — in characters that a Chinese speaker finds beautiful on their own terms.

What happened to 蝌蚪啃蜡

The original transliteration quietly disappeared. No one kept using it once 可口可乐 was available. A bad name, even a famous one, yields to a better one without a fight — provided the better one is genuinely better.

This is the only situation in naming where a second chance is guaranteed: if the first name is clearly wrong, the right name will replace it. But the process took Coca-Cola years and a newspaper contest. For a child, the second chance is a legal name change at age eighteen — a long wait for a better name.

Get it right the first time.

✨ Find a Chinese name that is beautiful on its own terms →

Related Articles

Try These Tools

Dig Into the Name Libraries