Starbucks in China -- a lesson in transliteration

Starbucks is a very interesting foray into giving Chinese names to western things. there are two typical ways to name things. If you have a company, you can either choose a Chinese name that sounds like your western one (such as Wa Er Ma for Walmart), which sometimes might give you weird bunches of characters (read about Coca Cola's travails! http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/tadpole.asp), or you can try to choose characters that sound nothing like your product but convey some nice message about how great your product is or what it stands for, or even just the English word translated into Chinese. So my Chinese name is Ai Li, which is a transliteration of my english name. Starbucks is the only name I've found so far that is a fifty-fifty split between transliteration and conveying a concept. The first character of its name is Xing, which means star. the second two characters are Ba Ke, which together form a transliteration of Bucks. So Xing Ba Ke is "Star" "bucks." This delights me!

The guy below is actually waving at us...