Cultural Factors In Brand Names And Their Translation Strategies

The translation of brand names has always been a complex problem to explain and handle in the field of translation due to its multiple meanings, special functions of brand name and its dependence on culture. Cultural images are the necessary components of the brand names'meanings and are crucial to the function of brand names. With the analysis on the meanings and properties of brand names and cultural images, the thesis accounts for the brand names of automobiles, cosmetics and clothes which contain profound cultural images. This thesis describes translation strategies of brand names from the perspective of relevance theory, that is, under the framework of relevance theory, how the translators perform their creative freedom in the process of translation to find the optimal relevance between the communicative intentions of source language and cultural context of target language and how they choose to employ translation strategies for the expectation that the readers in the receptive context will find out the communicative intentions embodied in commodities which finally makes the transference of the cultural images successful. Through studying brand names, this thesis aims at proving the explanatory power of relevance theory towards translation practice, and provides the translation of brand names with new perspectives.