As I wrote before, there are a few different ways how foreign words are imported into Chinese. A major distinction of the Chinese script is that its characters bear two aspects -- phonetic (sound) and semantic (meaning) -- which can act or be used whether separately or together.
For example, in English any given letter has only the phonetic aspect: "a" can be read in a few different ways, but has no meaning on its own. At the dawn of the alphabetic writing systems it was quite a different ballgame -- for example, the letter "A" in the Phoenician script had its own name -- "alef" -- and did have its own distinctive meaning -- "bull".
In a seemingly similar fashion, in Chinese "°¨" is pronounced "ma3" and means "horse". Sometimes, it can be stripped of its meaning and used purely as a phonetic, like in "°¨¨Ó¦è¨È" (Malaysia [Ma3 lai2 xi1 ya4]). That is the closest approximation to the phonetic script in Modern Chinese.
The following are some American trade marks written in Chinese:
1. Pure phonetic transcription
Amazon -- ¨È°¨»¹ (ya4 ma3 xun4)
Intel -- ^¯S (ying1 te4)
Ford -- ºÖ¯S (fu3 te4)
2. Phonetic + Semantic
Starbucks -- ¬P¤Ú§J (xing1 "star" + phonetic ba1 ke4)
McDonald's -- ³Á·í³Ò (mai4 "wheat" + phonetic dang4 lao2)
2. Pure Semantic
Microsoft -- ·L³n (wei2 "micro-" + ruan3 "soft")
Windows -- µøµ¡ (shi4 "look, see" + chuang1 "window")
General Motors -- ³q¥Î (tong1 yong4 "general")
Japanese trade marks
Since Japanese uses characters originally borrowed from Chinese, more
often than not, Japanese proper names, including trade marks, are written
using (sometimes slightly simplified) Chinese characters.
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However, quite a few new Japanese trade marks are written in katakana
and hence have no characters. In such cases, they are phonetically transliterated
using auspicious characters. Sony originally was written in Chinese
using pure phonetic symbols ¯Á¥§
[Suo3 ni2] -- meaning something like "essential dirt". Now the Japanese
company have opted for sexier ·s¤O
[Xin1
li4] meaning "new power".
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The borderline case of Yamaha that actually originates from a Japanese proper name ¤s¸ (pronounced Yamaha). However, it is always written in katakana, so the Japanese never suspect that it has characters. That is why it can be whether read the Chinese way according to its original Japanese name -- [Shan1 ye4], or phonetically transcribed as ¶®°¨«¢ [Ya 3 ma3 ha1].
There's a curious story of a Yamaha's trade mark abuse case where a Chinese pirate factory played on this script-pronunciation discrepancy. Scroll down this page to read the story titled Yamaha and the Chinese Motorcycle Sting.
