On The E-c Translation Of Brand Name

A brand name is the bridge between the consumers and the products. It's the "Name Card" of a product. A good brand name can arouse consumers' interests and their purchasing desires, advance the popularity and image of the product, and then promote the sales of it. To some extent, a brand name can even determine the fate of a product or a firm. Therefore, the translation of brand names has become a hot research topic. Many scholars home and abroad have studied the translation of the brand names from different perspectives, such as the Skopos Theory, Relevance Theory and Functional Equivalence etc. All these theories have promoted the work of brand name translation, and there appeared lots of well-translated brand names in the business world. With these successful translated terms, many foreign commodities sell very well in China. However, there are still many problems. This present thesis intends to study the major problems in the E-C translation of brand names and propose some solving suggestions.Memetics, a newly born subject, has shown its great power and attracted many scholars from different fields since it was born. The study of memes has been combined with studies of language, translation, marketing and advertising and had been approved very enlightening. The present author also tries to combine the study of memes with the study of brand name translation in the hope that it can provide some tips in this field.Taking memetics as the theoretical basis, the thesis studies how the memetics affects the E-C translation of brand names. As a beginning, the interaction relationship between the brand name and meme is studied in the guidance of the theory of memetics, and then a conclusion is drawn that it's completely possible and quite effective to apply memetics to the translation of brand names. After that, Heylighen's meme selection theory and his selective criteria are applied in analyzing the surviving ability of the brand memes. A successful brand name, namely a strong brand meme in target culture should meet the requirements of novelty, utility, coherence, and simplicity, etc. According to these criteria, many problems in the E-C translation of brand name are found through the analyzing of some existing brand names, such as loss of distinctiveness, violation of the principle of invariance and controllability, lack of novelty and simplicity, violation of the requirement of coherence, and violation of the quality of expressivity, etc. Thereafter, aiming at solving those problems and in the light of the theory of "strong meme" and the meme selective criteria, some corresponding suggestions and principles are proposed, such as differentiating the target consumer, making a brand name easy to pronounce and remember, considering Chinese Psychology, and avoiding confusion, etc. Finally, with the final goal to make a brand meme to be a strong one, and based on the theory of memetics of language, the following several methods about how to create strong brand memes are also presented with some persuasive examples:application of genotype memes, application of phenotype of memes, associating with fashions, and creating a successful language meme. Through these ways, a strong brand meme can be created, that is to say, a good translation of a brand name is achieved.