What exactly is in that exotic baby name? Now you can find out with a Today Translations Name Translation Audit
Celebrities and their crazy baby names: they do love ’em. And why not? Which is all very well when those names are pretty well-understood by the public at large. There’s not much wrong with the name Apple, daughter of Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin, or Geri Halliwells Bluebell Madonna.
Exotic
But those waters do get a little muddied as the names get more and more exotic. Take for example, Kai, the son of footballer Wayne Rooney and wife Coleen. Kai means “pier” in Estonian, “probably” in Finnish, “ocean” in Hawaiian and Japanese, “willow tree” in the native American language of Navajo, and “stop it” in Yoruba, a dialect of West Africa.
And what about Suri, the daughter of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes? Suri means “pickpocket” in Japanese, “turned sour” in French and “horse mackerels” in Italian. The Beckhams’ third child, Cruz, means “cross” in Portuguese and Spanish, but is also Spanish for “withers” (a part of a horse).
Consultancy service
The trouble is that giving your child an offbeat name can cause problems when they’re old enough to understand. And name changes later in life can be embarrassing, expensive and riddled with hassle.
That’s why we’ve decided to offer our new translation service: Name Translation Audit. It’s designed to help celebrities – or anyone else – consider the multilingual implications of giving their babies unusual names that might mean unexpected things in different languages. Best of all, for our brilliant team of 2600 linguists to check your baby name in 100 languages, you’ll be looking at just £1000.
The new service is open to anyone, says Jurga Zilinskiene, CEO of Today Translations. “But we expect at least some of the clients for it to be celebrities, given that many now like to give their babies unusual names.”
At Today Translations, our linguists know there’s more to professional translation services than mere words. We are a specialist translation company, capable of providing anything from interpreters, English to Arabic translation, to Russian to English, translation to English to French, and much much more.