b. Transliteration;In cases that the original brand names are not notional, that is to say, they do not make sense to the customers literally, transliteration is often used. It can be noted that many import brand names do not have actual meanings, the best way to translate them is transliteration. The strongpoint of using transliteration is that it can best preserve the rhyme and rhythm of the original brand, reflecting the product’s special emotional appeal. (Bao Huinan 285)
Examples of transliteration of brand names are in great amount, such as: “Marlboro” as “万宝路”, “Carlsberg” as “嘉士伯”, “Hennessy” as “軒尼诗”, “Lipton” as “立顿”, “Revlon” as “露华浓”, “Mazda” as “马自达”, “Renault” as “雷诺”, “Sony” as “索尼”, “Intel” as “英特尔”, “Mag” as “美格”, “Dell” as “戴尔”, “Erisson” as “爱立信”, “Siemens” as “西门子”, “Ricoh” as “理光”, “Nikon” as “尼康”, “Olympus” as “奥林巴斯”, “Adidas” as “阿迪达斯”, “Gucci” as “古姿”, “Rolex” as “劳力士” and “Omega” as “奥米茄”. Though this kind of translation can hardly associate the feature of the product with the name, they do follow some of the preconditions mentioned earlier in the paper like using characters with favorable meanings and making the translation short and fair-sounding. Take “IKEA” for instance, it is a famous furniture brand and its translation “宜家” makes use of the character “宜” meaning “appropriate for” and “家” meaning “home” to imply that the furniture are very appropriate for your home. Also, “宜家” is very easy to remember and sounds like its original brand very much. c. Others Methods; To deal with the translation of various foreign brand names is no easy job. When neither literal translation nor transliteration works, other methods should be made use of. For instance, “BMW”, a famous automobile brand, has a Chinese brand name as “宝马”, which is also known to many Chinese customers. “宝马” is neither a literal translation nor transliteration, but it is still a very impressive brand name if all those preconditions discussed earlier are considered. “宝” means “precious” and “马” (horse) implies that it is a automobile as “马” is one means of transportations in ancient China. But to a great majority of people, “BMW” is also a very famous brand. “Panasonic”, a Japanese brand for a great variety of electronic products like TV, Hi-Fi, CD player, DVD player etc, has a Chinese brand name as “乐声”, similar to the meaning of “beautiful sounds, music” in Chinese. “Hewlett-Packard”, a computer hardware corporation, now is known in China as “HP” or “惠普”, instead of its long and complicated original brand. “NEC”, an electronic appliance brand, does not have a translated brand name. Still, “NEC” is known to many people. From these examples, it can be concluded that there two possible ways to cope with such situation: one is to keep its original brand name like “NEC” and the other is to design a new Chinese brand name for the product like “乐声” and “惠普”. As long as it follows the preconditions of creating a successful translated brand name, different methods can be used on the basis of the actual situation. III. Conclusion Taking into account the detailed analysis and various examples discussed in this paper, it can be concluded that in translating foreign brand names, cross-cultural difference serves as a major influential factor. This factor should be prioritized when we deal with the translation of foreign brand names. In order to achieve a satisfactory result of the brand name translation, we, in the first place, must keep in mind the three preconditions discussed in this paper, namely, good semantics association of the translation, reflection of the product’s features and simple, easy to remember translation. Then, we could try our best to apply different methods to the translation work such as literal translation and transliteration. If necessary, two other methods, keeping the original name and working out a new brand name should also be considered. Works CitedBao Huinan. Wen Hua Yu Jing Yu Yu Yan Fan Yi (文化语境与语言翻译, Cultural Context and Language Translation). Beijing: China’s Foreign Language Translation Publishing Company, 2001.Chen Dezhang. “Cultural Connotation of Animal Words in English and Chinese” Aspects of Intercultural Communication—Proceedings of China’s 2nd Conference on Intercultural Communication. Ed. Hu Wenzhong Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 1999. 234-247Wells, William, et al. Advertising—Principles & Practice 4th ed. Beijing: Qing Hua University Press, 1999Xu Chongxin. “Cultural Exchange and Translation” Wen Hua Yu Fan Yi (文化与翻译, Culture and Translation). Ed. Guo Jianzhong Beijing: China’s Foreign Language Translation Publishing Company, 2001. 83-93
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