The Telegraph reports that Chinese businesses have gone nuts over President-Elect Barack Obama and that businesses are registering to use his name as a trademark on everything from instant noodles to children’s clothes, to coffee and even wooden logs.
None of the applications has so far been approved, and the likelihood of success is slim: all politician’s names are censored in China. To get around the block, some companies are already producing clothes marked “Aobama”, which is phonetically similar in Chinese.
I’m looking forward to some fun “Aobama” stuff on Engrish.com in the coming years.
Incidentally the 3 characters for Obama in Chinese* is: 歐巴馬 (or sometimes 奧巴馬)
The 3 characters for Barack in Chinese is: 巴拉克
And “Yes, we can” is translated to: 是的，我們能做到.
*I try to use the traditional characters whenever possible. I hate the simplified characters.
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1 Comment to “I want my Barack Obama (Aobama?) Coffee & Instant Noodles!”
8Asians.com » Asian Noodles In The News wrote:
[...] to talk about than Asian Noodles. 8asians has of course written about instant yakisoba recently and even had a discussion about instant noodles in reference to Barack Obama. This week the Atlanta Journal-Constitution did a review of instant noodles and the Fort Worth Star [...]
Posted on 26-Mar-09 at 10:13 am | Permalink
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