Cultural differences show up in Chinese American restaurant names
Lost in Translation: Investigating Systematic Discrepancies between Parallel English and Chinese Names of American Chinese Restaurants
Computation and Language
Summary
This paper looks at how Chinese and English names of Chinese restaurants in America differ and what those differences mean. The authors found that English names often focus on where the restaurant is or what food it specializes in, while Chinese names highlight positive feelings and atmosphere. They also discovered these differences are bigger in cities with more Chinese people, newer restaurants, or urban areas. Talking to restaurant owners helped confirm why these naming choices happen.
What this means in practice
- •For restaurant marketers: Design culturally tuned restaurant names by understanding the differences in meaning between English and Chinese names in US Chinese eateries.
- •For local business planners: Use naming difference patterns to better engage with ethnic communities and support culturally appropriate branding in diverse urban areas.
Authors
Hang Jiang, Nanxi Liu, Tiantian Wang, Cassandra Overney, Rukun Zhang, Artemisia Luk, Diyi Yang, Deb Roy, Jad Kabbara
Abstract
Given that the Chinese are one of the oldest ethnic groups to immigrate to the US, their cuisine have become central to the US dining scene and an interesting avenue to study how Chinese immigrants have culturally adapted into American life. In that regard, previous research has focused on analyzing the English names that Chinese restaurants adopt, e.g., finding the use of familiar and typical words. To investigate how Chinese immigrants have culturally integrated in the US depending on social, geographic and demographic contexts, we investigate in this work the under-explored relationship between the Chinese and English names of American Chinese restaurants. Specifically, we conduct a study on 3,172 Chinese restaurants (10% of the total on Google Maps) sampled across the US. We present 8-dimension name frames to capture the underlying meanings behind names and create the NameFrames dataset containing 884 annotated parallel Chinese/English names. We also built an NLP pipeline to analyze the semantic discrepancies between names with both frame-based and embedding-based distance metrics. Our frame analysis shows that English names more often emphasize Location and Specialty, while Chinese names more often emphasize Positivity and Ambiance. Furthermore, we observe that for Chinese restaurants located in urban areas, those in counties with a higher concentration of Chinese population, or those that are relatively new, the discrepancies between the English and Chinese names are noticeably larger. Finally, interviews with 10 Chinese restaurant owners reveal additional interesting insights regarding naming conventions.