Mozilla’s Chinese Brand Name: Mou Zhi
Mozilla’s new presence in China has been officially opened for “business” on June 2. They also launched Chinese Brand Name for Mozilla.
Li Gong wrote two posts about Mozilla’s Chinese Brand name: Mou Zhi. (1, 2), he said below:
Mozilla Online Ltd. and in Chinese shorthand as 谋智网络
The words Mou-Zhi in Chinese (谋智) means “seeking wisdom“. Mozilla Online shares the same vision of the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corp.
The first thing to note is that China operates on Chinese characters, which is not surprising until you realize the full extent of the rule is that English names are simply not accepted in business matters. For example, if a (ficticious) Mark Smith buys a house in China, he will be required to propose a Chinese name, go through a certification and notarization process to bind that name to himself, before he could obtain the title of the house, which will be issued in his Chinese name only.Secondly, getting an appropriate name in Chinese is non-trivial. One major difficulty is that Mozilla does not translate literally into Chinese. Even if a name happens to translate, the natural translation may not be suitable…….So we had two choices. One was to go with a phonetic translation. The other was to come up with something that is not linked to the name Mozilla either literally or phonetically. Obviously we preferred the former if it would work out.
The Chinese name closely resembles the Mo-Zi sound (Mou in Chinese is pronounced exactly as the English sound of Mo in Mozilla), and it has a great meaning in Chinese (seeking wisdom). Plus the particular Zhi character in this case takes a fourth tone, which is usually viewed as a better choice as the ending character for a company name — it is the most firm, certain, and strong tone of the four tones in Mandarin Chinese. We kept quiet and went to try to register the name. And somewhat surprised that we got it.
I like this name! Today I designed new Mozilla’s logo with Chinese Brand Name. See below:
This original Mozilla’s logo above I got it from Mozilla’s Visual Identity Guidelines web page.
The picture above shows two Chinese characters: Mou Zhi 谋智.
The last picture above is my idea on Mozilla new logo with Chinese name. It includes three parts, first is Mozilla’s logo, second is Chinese wordmark which is big red two Chinese characters Mou Zhi 谋智, third is English wordmark which is black small Mozilla Foundation.
Do you like my idea above ?