Diet Coke In China – Lost In Translation
November 16th, 2009 by Stephen Cronin [Shortlink]While I was going through my old photos, I came across the following (rather blurry) photo of a Diet Coke can:
I’ve previously featured a picture of a Diet Coke can by cogdogblog, which I found on Flickr. Although cogdogblog’s photo is much nicer, I thought I’d post my photo here, mainly so I could tell a related story.
I won’t re-tell the story of how I found Diet Coke – I did that in my original post about cogdogblog’s photo. Instead I’ll move on to a subsequent story.
After a long and desperate search, having finally found a can of Diet Coke, I took the photo above. This was back in 2002, when Diet Coke was almost impossible to get in China.
The reason I took the photo wasn’t for posterity or to put it on the Internet 7 years later. It was to keep on my camera, so I could show it to people at other restaurants / bars / shops and hopefully get a can of Diet Coke as a result.
The first time I tried to use the photo to get a can of Diet Coke was at a Buddhist restaurant at a tourist destination / scenic spot. I took out my camera, found the photo and showed it to the waitress. Her eyes lit up. She said something like “we have, we have” and went racing out the back.
She was back minutes later with an icy cold can of … Coke. Not Diet Coke. Coke.
Something was obviously lost in translation. Actually, I think at that time Diet Coke was so rare that the vast majority of people in China didn’t even know it existed. When presented with the photo, the waitress could tell it was a Coke product, but couldn’t differentiate between Coke and Diet Coke.
At the time, I wasn’t into Coke at all, I really only wanted Diet Coke, so this was major disappointment. The irony is that I no longer drink Diet Coke. I’m a Coke man again!
Tags: coke, photos, restaurant
Very good idea to take a photo for explaining later! You should have focused on the two black characters, because that’s the word for “diet”. The big red characters say “Coca Cola”, so it’s understandable that she didn’t notice the small black characters and just brought you a coke.
Güzel Konu Paylaşım İçin Teşekürler
I’m really not sure if there is anything “Lost in Translation” at all. As the first poster mentions, the large bold print is simply the Chinese transliteration of Coca-Cola. The smaller characters denote Diet: the character 健 means healthy; the second character 怡 means happy or cheerful; and its effect is to slightly lower the tone of the previous character for health and inject a sense of enjoyment into drinking the lower sugar content version of the drink.
It is natural that the waitress would pass up on the smaller print, when it would be the larger print to catch her attention. In fact, on the Mainland Diet Coke is still labeled under this same moniker “健怡可乐“； but it is probably now a lot better known!
Diet Coke vs Coke light.
Just to mention it. It is only Diet Coke in the US.
In Europe it is Coke light as well.
Interestingly, from 2003 till 2011 I never found one single can of Coke Light in Mainland,
but quite easily found Coke light lemon.
Coke and Pepsi distributed in the US and PRC are so terrible sweeter than Euopean and HK Coke and still cannot understand, how anyone could willingly drink that sh*t.
I am grateful for the wide availability of Coke Zero (I spit on Pepsi Max) nowerdays.
Loose weight pregnant…
[...]Diet Coke In China – Lost In Translation | Jobs In China[...]…
Lemonade Diet…
[...]Diet Coke In China – Lost In Translation | Jobs In China[...]…
During my many trips to shoe factories in Fujian province, Diet Coke was referred to as “fat-people’s Coke” by the locals. I thought that was hilarious!
detox weight loss…
[...]Diet Coke In China – Lost In Translation | Jobs In China[...]…