An Analysis Of The Influential Factors On Translation Of Trademark/Brand Name

Since its appearance about 1000 years ago, trademark has incorporated into man's daily life and has been affecting commercial production and consumption all the time. Nowadays, under the changeful and competitive global economy circumstance, trademark, as a language with no international barriers, has become the pioneer of the globalization trend. And, many issues about internationalization of economy, popularization of products have come forth, among which translation of trademarks is a hot topic with translators, linguists, sociologists, economics and other scholars.Small as it is, a trademark contains a lot of culture of a specific enterprise or organization and information of a certain product or service. Therefore, its translation can't be simply treated as a transferring process from one language into another.Falls into 5 parts, the present thesis tries to inquire into the principle behind trade name translation from the perspectives of linguistics, culture, economics and aesthetics.Chapter one offers an overview of the whole thesis, which introduces the literature review, assumptions, methodologies applied as well as the significance of trademark/brand name translation.Chapter two is a brief introduction to trademark/brand name translation. Besides a general explanation of brand and some related concepts, this chapter gives an analysis of normal principles and approaches dealing with the trade name translation. Basically, there are five approaches to trademark translation, namely literal translation, transliteration, combination of the two, free translation as well as creation. No matter what approach it is to be adopted, the translation of trademarks must obey the three principles, that is, target-orientation, correlation, and brevity.Chapter three deals with factors beyond text, such as the culture barriers, economic restricts, aesthetic appealing and so on. The theoretic foundation and methodology of the whole thesis are included in this chapter.Chapter four investigates trademark/brand name translation from the angle of Aesthetics. Based on reception theory, it also tries to analysis the role the reader plays through the translator in the process of translation.The last chapter concludes the whole paper with four points: Trademark/brand name translation is not source-text oriented anymore. Conversely, the reader, or consumer plays the main role that influences the translation process and result, thus, culture loss and barrier will no longer be the taboo. Creative ways of naming and translating, derived from the norms, seem to be the tendency of the future. Trademark/brand name translation is not a static result of translation, but a dynamic medium and process.