To improve English skills in Taiwan, I suggest that ad agencies stop using the Chinese pronunciation of brand names and start using the correct English one. Things like famousuh, Macdonal, daufen, footuh, and more
Mate, just stop and think that it is not in an ‘ad agency’s’ interest to improve the English of the population. People are going to be less likely to buy something if they have to learn how to read it’s name first.
The fact of the matter is, people don’t want to be forced to say things in English. Expecting your average Taiwanese 60 year-old to start learning how to pronounce ‘McDonalds’ in English is unreasonable, and a little bit elitist on your part I think nox… :?
I agree with Lazy MF. I think it’s okay to syllabilize English word into Chinese sounds. In fact I found this a very creative process of borrowing foreign words into Chinese. Not only english of course. Once cannot blame people’s bad pronunciation because the majority is using borrowed English word in Chinese or the Ad is renaming every foreign product into Chinese counterparts.
It takes a lot of creativity works to localize foreign product into target market. Marketing experts gets linguist to work hand in hand to make sure a product brand does not have bad image when spelled or borrowed into other languages. I’ve see some company did this for product branding.
Me, I’m neither pro nor against. But I love every product of creativity especially and original one:)
I like the youngster slang for “trouble” borrowed as “茶包” literally teabag.
segue,
anton xie