An OT Approach To The English-Chinese Brand Name Translation Strategies

English-Chinese brand name translation is a complicated linguistic, social, andcognitive activity, involving code-switching between English and Chinese and somesocial and mental aspects such as aesthetic pursuit, law observance, marketingpromotion, cultural adaptation, and psychological prediction of consumers. Thepresent research is attempted to explore the constraints on the choices of brand nametranslation strategies as well as the hierarchies of these constraints on each of thechoices from the Optimality Theory perspective.Optimality Theory (OT) was proposed by Prince and Smolensky in1993andoriginated in the field of phonology. In the past twenty years, it has shown its greatinfluence on modern linguistics and been applied to other linguistic fields such assecond language acquisition, syntax, semantics and so on. However, it has seldombeen employed in the translation study so far. Therefore, the application of OT in thestudy of English-Chinese brand name translation is a new and challenging task.Constraints and constraint hierarchies are the cornerstones of OT. Constraints areuniversal to all languages while constraint hierarchies are language-specific.Constraints are violable, but the violation must be minimal. The candidate thatminimally violates or maximally satisfies higher ranked constraints is the optimaloutput.This thesis has proposed the English-Chinese Translation Strategy System ofBrand Names, based on the unique features and functions of brand names, andComplete Translation Strategy System of Terminology initiated by Huang Zhonglian&Hu Yuanbing (2008). This strategy system consists of four main categories:transliteration strategy, free translation strategy, zero translation strategy andcomprehensive translation strategy.This research has detected six macro types of constraints on English-Chinesebrand name translation, which are respectively linguistic, aesthetic, legal, commercial,cultural and psychological constraints, and arrived at the hierarchical ranking of these constraints as follows: Legal Constraint, Cultural Constraint>> LinguisticConstraints>> Aesthetic Constraints>> Commercial Constraint>> PsychologicalConstraint. Furthermore, it has explored the concrete constraints on the choices ofdifferent types of translation strategies such as LEGAL,*CONFLICT,*COMPLEX,CODA-CON(nasal,-labial)σ),*VELAR-I, MinWd, MaxWd, MAX-IO(ST), MAX-IO,DEP-IO, IDENT-IO(place), IDENT-IO(place)/ONS, BEAUTY-M, BEAUTY-S,IDENT-IO(Inf) and TA, and discovered the constraint hierarchies for each of thestrategic choices. These hierarchical systems of constraints, which have been testifiedby a wide variety of translation examples, provide a yardstick for the assessment oftranslation quality and optimal target expression,Due to the changes in the economic situation, belief in individualism andconsumers’ psychological expectation in the Western countries or cultures, threegeneral tendencies in the choices of translation strategies have been discovered for theEnglish-Chinese brand name translation:(i) transliteration strategy tends to be appliedin the English-Chinese translation of the brand names made up of proper names;(ii)free translation strategy is preferred in the English-Chinese translation of the brandnames composed of common words;(iii) comprehensive translation strategy andcreative translation strategy tend to be employed in the English-Chinese translation ofthe coined words as brand names.