Chinese company names often have to do several jobs at once. Much more than their foreign equivalents of Microsoft, Sony, or Audi, they tend to directly signal quality, purpose, personality or values. Baidu (百度), for example, takes its name from a Song-dynasty poem and evokes the idea of persistent searching, an apt association for a search engine. Xiaomi (小米), literally “millet,” gives a technology company a more familiar and down-to-earth identity, while Alibaba (阿里巴巴) relies on phonetic familiarity and the international recognition of the Ali Baba story from 1001 Nights. In each case, the name helps establish what the brand is and how it should be perceived.

As an example of an international company doing this in exemplary fashion, Coca-Cola’s Chinese name 可口可乐 (kě kǒu kě lè, roughly “delicious happiness”) does not merely approximate the sound of the original name; it evokes something positive and memorable. The name helped make a foreign brand feel familiar and resonant in Chinese, and helped establish Coca-Cola as a staple drink in China.

For Swiss ERI actors, the challenge of creating a Chinese identity that works is just as relevant: a name has to sound right, work in written Chinese and avoid awkward associations. Ideally, it should also tell people something about why they should care.

With the Planetary Embassy, Swissnex in China’s flagship project for 2026 exploring new forms of diplomacy and ways of thinking by bringing the more-than-human world into the conversation, a similar exercise in exploring Chinese names became a matter of interest. Through an open call, Swissnex in China set out to collect ideas and received over 130 submissions with suggestions and explanations on how we might translate the Planetary Embassy’s name.

Planetary Thinking has emerged in the West to transcend human-centric, nation-state borders, prioritizing the interconnected Earth systems that define our world. China mirrors these concerns through ecological civilization – 生态文明 (shēng tài wén míng) – a concept deeply embedded in policy and discourse, framing the environment, economy, and governance as a collective “community of life.” While distinct in their intellectual and political origins, both frameworks converge on a crucial shift: moving beyond nature as mere scenery to foreground systems of life, continuity, and interdependence.

After careful consideration and several rounds of discussions, the entry we decided was best to represent the Planetary Embassy was 生生共议 (shēng shēng gòng yì). Put simply, 生生共议 could be understood as “coming together to discuss a living, continuously changing world”. It is not a literal translation of “Planetary Embassy”, but a Chinese expression that captures some of the ideas behind the project: life, continuity, interdependence and collective deliberation.

The first half of the expression, 生生 (shēng shēng), comes from the I Ching, or Book of Changes (《周易》), where it describes the continuous generation that characterizes change. In expressions such as 生生不息 (shēng shēng bù xī, “ceaseless renewal”), it evokes regeneration, continuity and life continually giving rise to new life, a sense of living systems, interdependence and ongoing transformation. The second half of the Planetary Embassy’s Chinese name, 共议 (gòng yì), takes the concept in a more deliberative direction. It means to discuss, with a more formal quality than simply talking, and to do so together rather than against one another. There is also something fitting about this in the older meaning of embassy: before “embassy” came to refer primarily to a permanent diplomatic mission or its premises, it described a mission sent to represent one party to another, an act of going between, carrying ideas and interests across a boundary.

A literal translation can preserve the original meaning and still fail to communicate. A clever transliteration can sound phonetically right, but contain no meaning at all. Good localization sits somewhere in between: faithful enough to remain recognizable, local enough to feel natural. Chinese is not simply another language into which an English name can be converted. The characters carry meaning as well as sound, and even small choices can create associations that were never intended in the original. A name can be grammatically correct and still sound stiff, overly formal, old-fashioned, comical, or simply unlike something a native speaker would naturally say. The problem is not always that the translation is “wrong.” Sometimes it is that it is technically correct but socially out of place.

In practice, that means naming work in China involves more than translators. Marketing teams, native speakers, legal advisers, local partners, and sector specialists – or, as in our case, the general public – can all have a role. The questions to ask are practical as much as linguistic: What does this character combination imply? How does it sound when spoken? Is it easy to remember and search? Could it create an unintended association? Does it work across different dialects? And does the name still make sense when the organization expands beyond its original product or program?

This is what makes 生生共议 (shēng shēng gòng yì) a localization rather than a translation in the narrow sense. The name does not reproduce “Planetary Embassy” word for word. Instead, it takes the ideas embedded in the English name and rebuilds them using concepts that already have meaning in Chinese. For a Chinese reader, 生生共议 (shēng shēng gòng yì) therefore offers a different entry point into the project: an invitation to collectively consider a living, interconnected world. It is a reminder that getting a name right in China is not about finding the most literal equivalent, but the expression that sounds natural, carries the right associations and gives people a reason to engage with the idea behind it.

At the same time, the name changes the concept. A successful Chinese name does not simply carry an identity across intact. It interprets that identity for a new audience – and, ideally, makes the idea easier to enter, remember and talk about. For Swiss ERI actors, the deeper question is therefore not simply how to translate a name, but what part of their identity actually needs to survive the journey into Chinese, and what might be gained by letting the name take on a life of its own.

While 生生共议 was our choice, several other submissions deserve an honourable mention for their remarkable poetic or conceptual depth, revealing alternative ways to frame the project for a Chinese audience.

山海会客厅 (shān hǎi huì kè tīng) – roughly, “Mountains and Seas Living Room” – drew on the Classic of Mountains and Seas (《山海经》, shān hǎi jīng), an ancient text populated by mountains, rivers, animals, spirits and other non-human beings. Here, humans become guests in a world in which the mountains and seas are already present as actors. 万物共声台 (wàn wù gòng shēng tái), or “Platform of All Beings’ Shared Voices,” approaches the idea through communication, while also playing on the similarity between 声 (shēng, “voice”) and 生 (shēng, “life”). And 自然有席 (zì rán yǒu xí), meaning roughly “Nature Has a Seat,” takes a more direct approach: nature is not merely discussed at the table; it has a place at the table. Each proposal solved the naming problem differently, but together they reveal ways of making an unfamiliar idea sound memorable and meaningful in Chinese.