Application Of Suggestiveness In Brand Name Transliteration Software Model

A brand name is considered to be one of the major assets of a firm. It can have impact on product evaluations and purchase decisions. Brand naming has to follow its principles. Likewise, the translation of brand names also needs to follow the principles, one of which is a high memorability of brand names.In 2003, Yih Hwai Lee and Kim Soon Ang studied the functions of brand name suggestiveness of Chinese characters. They found that: Chinese brand names comprising of suggestive characters, compared to those with non-suggestive characters will lead to higher brand name recall; Chinese brand names comprising of unfamiliar characters with suggestive radicals, compared to those with non-suggestive radicals, will lead to higher brand name recall.Other researchers also found that a large proportion of transliterated brand names in Chinese market successfully apply various suggestiveness, winning the favor of customers.Psycholinguists found that Chinese characters of up-down structures are much more difficult to be radically processed than Chinese characters of left-right structures. Thus this paper put forward a hypothesis: when transliterating foreign brand names or brand naming, the memorability of the brand names comprising of unfamiliar Chinese characters with suggestive radicals of left-right structure is higher than that of the brand names comprising of unfamiliar Chinese characters with suggestive radicals of up-down structure. This hypothesis was proved to be true by an investigation.Based on the findings of Yih Hwai Lee and Kim Soon Ang and the results of this investigation, for the purpose of promoting the application of suggestiveness in brand name transliteration, a data base of Chinese characters suggestive of attributes of certain product was established, and an English-Chinese Brand Name Transliteration Software Model was developed with the help of programmers, making its own little contribution to brand name transliteration.