My two favorites: Coke and BMW. As sdz points out in his/her comment, whoever came up with Coke's name 'ke kou ke le' did an amazingly clever job while still r

My two favorites: Coke and BMW. As sdz points out in his/her comment, whoever came up with Coke's name 'ke kou ke le' did an amazingly clever job while still retaining much of the sound of the original. [1] Yet to be mentioned is BMW, one of my personal favorites. Their Chinese name, 宝马 (bao ma), literally means 'Treasured Horse' [2] but its more than that. 宝宝 (bao bao) is a common way to address a baby, something like 'little treasure' but not so pretentious in Chinese. And there are stories (I think from the 3 Kingdoms era) which refer to a character's reliable and sturdy horse as, "so-and-so's Bao Ma". Really a great name. Coincidentally, as you might expect, its very hard for non-Chinese to understand the nuances of Chinese names. I have a modest command of Mandarin but some names that I think are quite interesting (Sprite - Xue Bi - ~Snow Jade) are not very well thought of by my Chinese relatives. Others like Subway (sai bai wei) which I thought was kinda wonky (100 Flavors?) are big hits as the article mentions. 1. Coke - http://goodcharacters.com/blog/blog.php?id=79 http://goodcharacters.com/blog/blog.php?id=79 2. BMW Bao Ma - http://goodcharacters.com/blog/blog.php?id=66 http://goodcharacters.com/blog/blog.php?id=66 [Update: added link to explanation of Coke's transliteration]