A Contrastive Study Of Brand Names In English And Chinese

A Contrastive Study of Brand Names in English and ChineseAbstractPostgraduate: Xie Fen Supervisor: Professor Zhou QuanlinBranding is the result of the development in commodity economy. Its basic function is to distinguish the product from its competitors'. Nowadays, the world economy is entering an era of brands' competition. In order to take part in this competition, it is crucial for an enterprise to have international brand names apart from high quality products it manufactures.Brand names can be classified into common words and coined words from the point of view of linguistic. The common words are the existing words in real vocabulary while the coined words do not exist in real vocabulary but are fabricated by people. Any language has its uniqueness and cultural characteristics. Similarly the brand names also have their special cultural information. It is good to make a contractive study of brand names that come from different cultural background. We can benefit a lot from it and make the Chinese brand names have an international flavor.There are some common in naming brand names in English and brand names in Chinese. For example, names of places, rivers and mountains, person or allusion can be used as brand names. Brand names are relatively short, so generally speaking, such devices as symbolism and association are used in naming so as to convey the information about the products as much as possible. But there are some obvious differences in the brand names in English and the brand names in Chinese because of the differences between the cultural psychology, the linguistic characteristics and the way of thinking.The formations of English vocabulary are various, yet they still observe certain principles to some degree. Usually Latin words, Greek words and anagrammatic spelling are used as brand names in English. It is a tendency in the West that the pronunciation is paid more attention to than the meaning in a brand name. If the pronunciation is sweet-sounded and easy to be remembered by the consumers, then the name is considered as a success.Most brand names in Chinese are in the form of Chinese characters or Pinyin. They are suit for domestic markets but not suit for foreign markets well. A Chinese word is usually made up of two syllables. That is why brand names in Chinese are mainly in the form of two syllables, while one syllable, three syllables and four syllables are less used in brand names. Moreover, most of them are word groups or phrases, which can be classified into five groups, i.e. the coordinate word group, the word group consisting of a modifier and the word which it modifies, the predicate-object word group, the subject-predicate word group and the supplementary word group. Chinese is a typical ideograph. The Chinese consumers have had the habit of thinking the associative meaning of a Chinese character at the sight of it. A brand name is difficult to remember if it is meaningless. However, even if it is meaningless in English, a brand name becomes meaningful when translated into Chinese. There has been a naturalist tendency in Chinese brand names for a long time. Not only the names of the places where the products are produced but also the names of the places ofhistoric interests are used in establishing brand names. Once some characters become the hot points, the brand names will lose their distinctive characteristics.In the West sense of individuality is very prevailing. What's more, the companies usually belong to individuals, thus the personal names or surnames are used in brand names. On the contrary, Confucianism is the main stream in traditional Chinese culture which underlines hospitality and harmony, and belittles individualism. It is for this reason that names of the founders of the companies or the inventors of the products are not so related to brand names in China.It is very important to select a brand name in the present-day brand competitive world. The general principle of naming a brand is pronounceable, memorable...