Equally important to determining the international viability of name candidates is gauging the name's appropriateness -- linguistically and culturally. Placing names into a marketplace without checking whether or not they might be offensive or ridiculous to the local populace not only betrays a parochial attitude on the part of the name's owner, but signals to potential customers, employees and business partners that their way of life is of little consequence to the company that wishes to benefit economically from them. In other words, companies that commit linguistic and cultural gaffes with their product and service names run the risk of presenting themselves as ignorant, careless, or, at the very least, insensitive.
Bad literal translations aren't the only danger in naming for the global market. How familiar are you with the culture of the countries in which you propose to market your product or service? Imagine launching your new online banking product only to discover the name is shared with a popular penniless, or miserly, character. It would be like opening Crachitt Bank or Scrooge Financial without any knowledge of the characters from Dickens' A Christmas Carol, a reference from classic English literature which is likely to be well-known among English-speaking audiences.
Even tougher to keep up with are popular culture references, often arising from television, movies, popular music, or even political scandals. Consider the differences in cultural association that have arisen over the last 40 years for American English words such as "groovy," "gay," and "crack," as well as entirely new vocabulary such as "ecology," "skyjacking," and even "Internet."
These are hard lessons to learn, but happily such situations are relatively easy to avoid by taking the names that you seriously consider to a linguistic and cultural analysis in each of your international markets. That is, you need to check with the Spaniards in Spain and the Colombians in Colombia if both Spain and Colombia are markets for your product, as the Spanish spoken in Spain is distinct enough from the Spanish spoken in Colombia to affect the pronunciation and perception of your product name. Inhabitants of the two nations will also have different cultural takes on any given name.
Planning your linguistic and cultural screening strategy is, like trademark searching, also a question of key international markets. The starting place is still the list of your current and future international markets, but you must also take into consideration that many countries have two or more official or unofficial languages or dialects, and plan your testing accordingly. For instance, you could in theory plan to market your product only in German-speaking Switzerland, excluding the French-speaking areas, but you may still wish to consider screening in the Swiss French dialect so as to avoid insulting those French speakers who will see your product displayed. Another case in point is the U.S., where screening for English alone overlooks the many dialects of Spanish, Tagalog, Chinese, and other languages which are spoken as first languages by significant numbers of American consumers.
Working with your naming consultant, you can develop a linguistic/cultural analysis that takes the following into consideration for each name, in each market:
Given limited resources, international trademark searches and linguistic/cultural analyses may seem like a huge hurdle to get past as you struggle to release a product, but they are part of the price of doing business internationally. In the long run, this investment pays off.
Page 3 of 4 
