Several days ago I was looking for the entrance to one of the big Carrefour outlets in Shanghai. This is the French-based retailer that is second to Wal-Mart in overall global sales but is far more successful than Wal-Mart in China. A Wal-Mart official once told me that he thought hostility to recent U.S. foreign policy had been a drag on the firm’s brand-image in China. Who knows — that certainly hasn’t slowed down McDonald’s, Apple, Dell, Buick, or Starbucks.
On a sidewalk I asked a security guard, in Chinese, where the store might be. The “could you tell me where” part of the question seemed to come across serviceably. But the store’s name, as I phrased it, led to a look of utter bafflement on the guard’s face. I used the Chinese sounds I thought most comparable — ka ri fu ah — and added the words for department store, but I got nowhere.
Then I stepped back and looked up, and saw that the guard and I were standing right in front of Carrefour’s main entrance. I thanked him and stepped into the store, only to wonder: how can this be? I mean, apart from cognitive failure on the guard’s side, and linguistic on mine?
There is an answer, and it involves one strange way in which China is less directly open to foreign influence than, say, Japan. In general, China seems more easy-going and matter-of-fact about incorporating foreign ideas, customs, and people than Japan is. The why and how of this assertion is for another day. But when it comes to adopting foreign words, China seems for some reason more restrained than Japan.
Japan has a special phonetic alphabet used largely (but not only) for writing foreign-derived words. This is katakana, and much like the use of italics in this very sentence, it often indicates a word that’s been appropriated from another language. Since the sounds of katakana are so easy to learn, and since so many of the imported words come from English, English speakers can very quickly make sense of some crucial parts of the written Japanese around them. You’re looking for Carrefour in Tokyo? It’s spelled カルフール, pronounced ka ru fu ru, close enough to let you guess. Carrefour has been a commercial failure in Japan, but that’s not the point for now.
You want to buy a computer in Japan? You look for コンピュータ, pronounced kon pyu ta, again not that hard to figure out once you get with the system.
China instead takes the French approach – borrowing the foreign concept but re-creating it in its own domestic terms. You want a computer in China? You need to find a 电脑, pronounced dian nao. It means “electric brain” in Chinese, so that makes perfect sense – except that there’s no way to guess at the pronunciation, or even tell quickly, as you can with Japanese, which of the characters indicate the foreign term.
And if you’re looking for Carrefour in Shanghai, it turns out that what you want is 家乐福. The characters mean family, happiness, wealth, so that is nicely auspicious. But they’re pronounced jia le fu – which I couldn’t guess as “Carrefour” until I saw them, and which the guard didn’t guess from what I said. (To be fair, this was mainly his fault. I can’t have been the first foreigner to be looking for the store that was five feet away from his duty station. This is one of many indications that Chinese education is not necessarily the all-conquering genius-creating marvel often described in the West.)
Similarly, when trying to get by taxi to a Sheraton hotel, I had a much easier time once I realized that “Sheraton” was written 喜来登 and pronounced xi lai deng. If you’re ever tempted to think that the world is becoming too similar as it becomes more modern, my word for you is: Carrefour. Rather, jia le fu.
