Astudy On Brand Name Translation From The Perspective Of Cultural Schema

With the rapid development of economic globalization and China's entry into the World Trade Organization, China is more closely related with the world. The problem of brand name translation exists in the entry of China's products to the world market and foreign products into the Chinese market. The quality of the brand name translation directly affects the sales of products. The brand name translation plays a vital role in whether brand names which enjoy a very high reputation in a domestic market can be accepted and favored by consumers in markets of other countries.Cultures are formed in the development of society and cultural differences exist in different nations. Brand names in different countries by all means convey different cultural meanings and influence people's attitudes towards life and fashion development. As great differences in customs and traditional cultures exist between China and western countries, the words with the same references contain different cultural connotations and associative meanings in different languages. If translators do not make appropriate conversion and adaptation in the translation process, problems will be produced in translation. Like any other translation, the brand name translation is a form of cross-cultural communication and is also concerned with the factors of linguistic regularities, psychological culture, aesthetic feelings, value orientations and so on. As a very important part of advertisement translation, the brand name translation has its inherent rules and in particular, the cultural meaning implied in it can not be ignored. Otherwise misunderstandings or loss of meanings is caused and the meaning in the source text can not be conveyed accurately in the target text, which affects enterprises'competition in the world market. Therefore systematic research needs to be done on it.Currently, there have been some Chinese translation scholars who have began to carry out the studies on it. The academic study of brand name translation has been popular in an unprecedented way and a number of research achievements have emerged, the translation of foreign brand names into Chinese in particular. However, in the present brand name translation, the understanding and translation of brand names by translators are limited to the overemphasis on literal meaning and semantic meanings. Studies on brand name translation on the cultural level of the research are far from enough.The term schema comes from Greek and with 70 years of development, the schema theory has been widely applied to fields of anthropology, psychology, etc. The essence of the theory lies in that the understanding and explanation of new things depend on the schemata already existent in the brain, and when people understand new things, new things need to be connected with concepts, past experiences which are called background knowledge. In recent years, the schema theory has been used in foreign language teaching, especially in English reading and listening comprehension. Some scholars have also tried to apply the schema theory to translation theory and practice. For instance, Zhou Dubao (2002) explores the explanation power of the schema theory on understanding and translation, and believes that readers should activate schemata stored in their mind and fully play their cognitive abilities so as to have more accurate and overall understanding of translation, which has ever inspired the thesis.As one component of the schema theory, the cultural schema includes educational background, personal experiences, customs, ways of thinking and many other cultural elements. By adopting the schema theory, translators can activate cultural schemata in target text readers and well achieve the functions of brand names. Therefore, the application of the cultural schema to the brand name translation can be used as a theoretical framework to better reflect the cultural factors implied in brand names, which is helpful for enterprises to establish good brand images and occupy competitive and favorable positions in the world market. However, the application of schema theory in translation, especially in brand name translation has not been paid much attention to until recent years. So the thesis tries to discuss the translatability and translation methods of brand names from a new perspective of cultural schema, a concept in the schema theory.There are five chapters in this thesis.Chapter one is about the review of development and studies on the schema theory and brand name translation. It proves the necessity and practicality of brand name translation.The second chapter deals with the theoretical basis of the thesis and gives a detailed explanation of the schema theory, including the definition and classification of schema as well as the classification and application to translation of cultural schema. In this thesis, the schema is classified into formal schema and content schema. Whether the cultural schema, an important part of the content schema can be accurately understood and activated is an extremely important link in the translation process, which has a direct influence on translation.The third chapter firstly summarizes the definition and classification of brands and brand names given by important scholars at home and abroad as well as the informative, vocative and aesthetic functions and translation principles of consumer-centeredness and faithfulness to the source text of brand names. Further the meaning of brand name translation is pointed out.The translatability of brand names is discussed in chapter four, the main part of the thesis. Firstly, this chapter analyzes the process of applying the schema theory to translation with two steps of decoding the source text and encoding the target text. Cultural schemata can be transformed; the human thinking is similar; human have learning abilities. All these factors determine that brand names are completely translatable.On the basis of the discussion above, chapter five proposes several translation methods of brand names such as literal translation, transliteration, combination of literal translation and transliteration, and adjustment including addition, deletion, blending, etc and carries out a lot of empirical analysis. Sometimes these methods have to be combined.The conclusion part points out that due to limitation of the length and knowledge, the thesis talks about the brand name translation only from the angle of culture without much reference to other factors that affect the brand name translation. Generally speaking, the thesis brings forward a new perspective of brand name translation to activate the cultural schema in the target text readers and convey cultural meanings, which is of great help for the improvement of brand name translation and the internalization of brand name design.