A Research On The Translation Of Brand Names--From The Perspective Of Skopostheorie

This paper discusses the principle of the brand name translation from English to Chinese and its representing application in practice. After the survey of the translations of brand names on market, this paper finds out some general properties of translated brand names (simple, easy to learn, suggestive, informative, etc.). Different with other previous articles, which have based their study of brand name translation on the equivalence theory, this paper provides Skopostheorie, a new guiding theory to the study of brand name translation. From the purpose point of view, namely the Skopostheorie, this paper approaches its application in practice (positioning, which includes the factors of association, culture and aesthetics), and suggests their translating strategy and translation methods (transliteration, literal translation, combining transliteration and free translation, etc.) with a hope to shed some new light on the translation of brand name.The methodology applied in this research is case study and survey. The data of three hundred examples of translated brand names are randomly collected from supermarket, newspapers, magazines and advertisement, etc.From the case study of examples of the brand name translation, this paper draws the conclusion that memorability and information constitute the main part of a company's Skopos. The Skopos determines the positioning of translated brand names, as this paper names, the name positioning. Name positioning is a purposeful action, which defines what and which associations of a translated brand name want to be perceived by the consumers. When focusing on positive company image positioning, it is company-oriented; when focusing on product attributes, characteristics and product class, it is product-oriented and/or information-oriented; when focusing on creating positive cultural associations, it is customer-oriented and/or culture-oriented. But in all they are Sktopos-oriented.