Just this past Wednesday, Starbucks released the official redesign of their classic logo. In a bold move somewhat reminiscent of The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, they dropped the name of the company from their logo, freed the iconic, spread-finned siren from her circular prison, and zoomed up on her face (which, according to the senior creative manager at Starbucks, also went through a few fine calibrations of its own). While there’s been no small amount of outcry over this “travesty” of branding from loyal Starbucks enthusiasts (one of whom babbled about her gold-card status in a not-so-subtle threat), I for one think that the new wordless logo is a brave and applause-worthy maneuver toward true globalization on Starbucks’ part.

Straight from the mouth of Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, “our new brand identity will give us the freedom and flexibility to explore innovations and new channels of distribution that will keep us in step with our current customers and build strong connections with new customers.” From one angle, it’s pretty clear that Starbucks is going to move beyond caffeinated beverages, hence the removal of the word “coffee” from their logo. From another angle, though, by liberating their brand from the confines of language, building strong connections with new customers is precisely what they’re going to achieve in international markets.

A few months back, a new buzz word started popping up among language professionals in cyber space: globality. Described as the “end-state of globalization,” globality is essentially the ultimate goal of companies engaging in globalization/localization, a state in which their brand and products are equally and accurately represented across countries, cultures, and languages. (Side note: I’ve tried and tried to coin the word “localicious” for this very concept, but it never seemed to catch on.) In this respect, the new Starbucks logo is a huge leap over what may have otherwise been an alienating hurdle. They’re now a lot closer to globality than ever before.

Consider this: in a country like China, which is where I live, there are some 300 Starbucks locations. Traditionally speaking, the Chinese are not a coffee-drinking people; many of the older generation won’t touch the stuff. But coffee consumption, since the opening of the first Starbucks in China in 1999, has become a popular (if not expensive) pastime among younger Chinese people and businessmen.

In honor of his birthday this past Saturday (Nov. 27th), we thought it would be cool to share with you a Monday Morning Quote from the master of lightning fists himself, both actor, teacher, and philosopher—the indomitable Bruce Lee (李小龍). Contrary to popular belief (especially in China), Bruce Lee was actually a full-blooded American, having been born in China Town, San Francisco, only to move to Hong Kong with his family at three months of age.

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.

Interestingly enough (for someone who grew to become an international icon for martial machismo), Bruce Lee’s nickname growing up was Sai Fon (细鳳), which according to Lee’s online biography is a girl’s name meaning “Little Peacock” in Cantonese. This is because, after losing their first son within a few month’s after his birth, Lee’s parents felt that males born into their family were cursed with bad luck. So the female nickname given to Bruce was an attempt to trick any malignant ghosts that may have otherwise brought disaster on their newborn baby boy.

In spite of his cutesy beginnings, a little peacock Bruce Lee was not. For one, in his role as a celebrated martial arts instructor, Bruce Lee helped Chuck Norris become the human killing machine later known as Walker, Texas Ranger. In addition to having trained some of the world’s best known martial artists, Bruce Lee’s many skills also included performing one-hand pushups with only his thumb and forefinger, sending people flying across the room with his one-inch punches, and being an award-winning Cha-Cha dancer (betcha’ didn’t know that one!).

For those of you who grew up throwing air punches and kicks, who dreamt about learning the legendary dim mak touch of death on a secluded, arboreous mountain in China, be sure to dedicate a boisterous WAAAATAAAAAAAAH!! today to our friend and kung fu master, Mr. Bruce Lee.

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As a Friday treat, I thought I’d take this opportunity to teach an interesting Chinese phrase to all of our friends and fellow logophiles out there in cyberspace.

A while back, I talked about the phrase 马后炮 (mă hòu pào), which is essentially a way of telling someone to shove it when they scold you for an event or situation that’s too late to avoid. (One of our readers suggested an English translation of “No use crying over spilled milk,” which I think is pretty appropriate.) In that same entry, we discussed how the Chinese language is chock-full of metaphorical idioms (called chengyu, or 成语) pulled from ancient stories and literature, which are used to offer concise insight into common experiences or situations.

Today, I’d like to talk about another one of my favorite Chinese idioms: 刻舟求剑 (kè zhōu qiú jiàn). To take this phrase character by character, 刻 (kè) means to carve or engrave, a 舟 (zhōu) is a boat, 求 (qiú) is a verb meaning to seek, and 剑 (jiàn) means sword. Put them all together, and this phrase literally means “to mark (or put a notch on) the boat to find one’s sword.” But what the heck does that mean? Read on a bit and it’ll make more sense, I promise.

Tomorrow is the 15^th day of the eighth lunar month, which means that the Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节) has arrived here in China. It usually coincides with the autumnal equinox, one of only two occasions in the year when the length of night and day are nearly equal.

Like a fair amount of Chinese holidays, the Mid-Autumn Festival is also a posthumous celebration of bitter-sweet romance. (Check out our last entry on the Qixi Festival for another example of this.) There’s a lot of disagreement about the specifics behind the Mid-Autumn Festival, but most accounts agree that there once was a totally amazing, Chuck Norris-like archer named Houyi (hoe-ee) who, in typical awesome-hero fashion, had a beautiful wife named Chang’e (chong-uh).

The following is the mythology behind the Mid-Autumn Festival recreated for you in 10 easy-to-digest bullet points.

In celebration of a long-awaited Friday, I thought it might be fun to teach ya’ll a little Chinese. If you enjoy this kind of thing, maybe we can do it more often.

This won’t be a Chinese lesson—not in the grammatical and learn-new-vocabulary sense. Rather, I wanted to share the history behind an interesting phrase. For those who aren’t familiar with the Chinese language, it’s uniquely possessed of many, many metaphorical idioms (often consisting of four characters) that derive from ancient stories and literature. Everyday conversations are literally teeming with these sayings, which often offer concise insight into a common experience or situation.

The phrase I’d like to focus on today is 马后炮 (mă hòu pào), which literally means “a canon behind the horse.” In colloquial use, when you tell someone not to canon-behind-the-horse you, it means that an incident has already occurred. You can’t change it, so there’s no use bringing it up. This phrase is especially useful when responding to I-told-you-so situations in which someone scolds you, or offers a post hoc solution to something that has already happened, and is thereby unavoidable.

But what does this have to do with horses and canons? Oddly enough, the phrase comes from Chinese Chess. Here’s some quick background information:

Guest blog entry by Robert Derbyshire, Technical Writer and TermWiki Commandant.

Everyone is well used to criticizing English speakers for their awful foreign language skills. I remember speaking to a guy from Norway a few years ago about the languages he studied at school. He said Swedish, German and French. I asked him “what about English?” He replied in passing, “Oh, we’re expected to be fluent in that by middle school.”

He failed to mention that they were expected to be fluent in a foreign language by age of 15. In the UK, foreign languages have been in retreat for years. Six years ago, after the government made language study optional after age 14, language uptake at GCSE level (age 15-16) has dropped by a third.

While I’d love to flex my British blogging wings and have a good old moan about life, the universe and everything, for the moment I’d like to explore some of the unusual moral dilemmas that an English native speaker faces when he or she actually decides to walk upstream and try to learn a foreign language.

It’s the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, folks, and that means it’s time for the Qixi (chee shee) festival here in China. “Qixi” literally means “The Seventh Evening” (some say “Night of Sevens,” but I don’t agree with that translation), a holiday a little bit like the Chinese version of Valentine’s Day in the west. Because it’s a Chinese holiday, though, it’s a lot more sweet and sour than its straight-out sweet American counterpart.

There are many different stories behind the origins of this holiday. Most explanations are pretty much the same, with the exception of a few minor details. In typical businessblog-like fashion, I’ll give you the story in a nutshell (brought to you in only 10 bullet points!).

For as much emphasis as people put on the translation side of localization, it’s refreshing to come across some real-life examples of localization in the true sense of the word, where localized products aren’t just carbon copies of their source products, but truly redesigned and re-marketed for their target locales.

While I was sweating my [censored] off in Beijing’s subway the other day, I noticed a really cool shirt that only the nerdiest of localization nerds could appreciate. So I thought I’d share it with you ‘cause, hey… it’s localicious. (That’s right, I said “localicious.” It’s a new adjective that means awesomely localized. Use it, translate it. Make it viral, folks, ‘cause we need some more lively terms in this industry. In fact, I’m going to go add it to TermWiki right now.)

Anyway, before I talk about the T-shirt, you’re going to need some background information on Chinese eye exams. You’ve probably never even thought about this before—I know I didn’t until I lost a pair of glasses on an unruly jet-ski in Sanya—but eye charts in China don’t start with a giant capital E followed by a bunch of other letters in the Latin alphabet.

The theme of CSOFT’s 2010 Worldwide Summit was “The Power of Language”—something that, more than an amoebic catchphrase meant to imbue the event with meaning, really does have an application at our office and in the localization industry as a whole. But not in the way that you might think.

As a localization service provider, language is naturally something with which we are intimately involved. (Can I get a “Duh” here, please?) In the case of our Summit, however, the focus was not on translation, transcreation, nor on multilingual terminology management. These topics, though apropos, are entirely too symptomatic in their approach improving best practices in the localization industry.

More germane to our internal processes at CSOFT is the idea that language, as a powerful phenomenon, has an immeasurably huge effect on company culture, production behavior, and how we work together. Specifically, as we work in an industry with a heavy emphasis on project management, the ways in which we define our roles, communicate, delegate, and interact with both clients and internal staff alike can make or break the quality of a localization project.

To drive this message home in an ancillary manner, our sneaky President and CEO, Shunee Yee, hosted an art exhibit during CSOFT’s annual Friday Night Party, in which she portrayed through her own private collection of art the lasting effect that language has had on Chinese culture, art, and society as a whole.