Explorations On Cosmetic Brand Name Translation

As the consumption level and the living quality have increased considerably, Cosmetics industry became one of the fastest growing products, which has the strongest effects on consumer market. People come to realize the importance of good band names and their proper translations in the international economic competition. It is not only necessary but urgent for people to make study on cosmetic brand names and their translations. Therefore, the exploration of cosmetic brand name translation has practical significance.This thesis attempts to explore cosmetic brand name translation from a pragmatic perspective by adopting Verschueren's Adaptation Theory. The translation of cosmetic brand name, as the translation of other items, can be affected by language itself, social psychology, manners, customs and so on, but it has its own characteristics. The author will put those elements in to a unified frame, and then propose her own views in order to provide some valuable reference to cosmetic brand name translationAdaptation Theory argues that using language consists of the continuous making of linguistic choices in every possible level of language structure for language-internal and language-external reasons by the language users who use it consciously or unconsciously. The possibility of choice making lies in the three properties of language: variability, negotiability and adaptability. The theory of adaptation theory offers four angles for explaining and describing language use, namely, contextual correlates of adaptability, structural objects of adaptability, dynamics of adaptability and salience of adaptation processes.Cosmetic brand name translation is a special form of language use. The translator has to make various choices and adaptations during the process of translation. Cosmetic brand name translation is a dynamic process of making adaptation with regard to contextual correlates and structural objects at various levels of salience. So the cosmetic brand name translation can be approached by Verschueren's adaptation theory.This thesis is divided into three main chapters:Chapter one is an overview of Verschueren's adaptation theory.The second chapter elucidates the rationality of the application of language structure adaptation to the translation of cosmetic brand names and analyzes how the translators adapt to the phonetic sound, vocabulary, and semantic meaning during the translation process.The third chapter depicts the significance of context adaptation to the translation of cosmetic brand names. Context adaptation requires the translators to consider the potential consumers'psychological world, physical world and the socio-cultural world.Through the analysis, the paper comes to the conclusion that Adaptation Theory as the strategy of cosmetics brand translation is reasonable and comprehensive. Finally, the author creates a tentative model of cosmetic brand name model and hopes it will help Chinese cosmetic brands to reach their new frontiers.