无线你的无限
Chinese has many homophones, which allows for some nice slogans, like this one for Intel’s Centrino chips—without wires you have no limits, taking advantage of the fact that 无线 (wireless) and 无限 (limitless) are homophones.
I was remind of this looking at John Pasden’s discussion of eBay’s new Chinese ads—Sinosplice | Archives | eBay and Wordplay
Now if only they hadn’t used 笔记本 (literally pen-record-book) for a regular notebook computer; it would have been the perfect term for a Tablet PC.
May 11th, 2005 at 6:22 am
Regular notebook is tranlated into 筆記型電腦,and the
Tablet PC is called 平板電腦 in Taiwan.
Some people shorten 筆記型電腦 into 筆電,but I haven’t
heard people called it 筆記本.
To connect 無線 & 無限 is clever
May 11th, 2005 at 9:48 am
Interesting. Google gives 2,520,000 hits for “笔记本” and 19 of the first 20 are computers, mostly without “电脑.” Doing it with traditional characters and adding “tw” brings up many fewer.