Brand Name Translation From The Perspective Of Menetics

In the international market, the sales of products are determined, to a certain extent, by thepopularity of their brand names, upon which the translation of them usually exerts muchinfluence. Therefore, a good translation plays an important role in the foreign trade.There is no denying that many scholars have probed into brand name translation with theframework of traditional translation theories, but hardly has anyone applied memetics to thistopic. The present thesis is intended to explore brand name translation with the emerging theoryof memetics.Memetics, as a new theory established for interpreting cultural evolution, comes fromanalogy to genetics. A meme, the most important concept of memetics, is also an analogy to agene, functioning as a unit of cultural replication and transmission. The present thesis justfollows such a method of analogy in exploring the process of brand name translation, so itregards a brand name as a meme and the translation of a brand name as the intercultural andinter-linguistic transmission of a brand name meme. Under this prerequisite, the thesis proceedsto elaborate the mechanism of the brand name translation from the perspective of memetics: abrand name meme is separated into two parts, a brand name meme coat and a brand namememe core respectively; the meme coat, as the literal form of the brand name meme, has to bereconstructed into a new one in order to comply with the target culture and facilitate the meme’sdecoding by target consumers, while the meme core, as the essential information the originalproducers intend to convey, should be replicated so as to maintain intact; then the reconstructedmeme coat assembles with the replicated meme core to form a new brand name meme, whichachieves pragmatic equivalence and maintenance of memetic hereditary substance with theoriginal brand name meme. A memetic model of brand name translation is also established for abetter interpretation of the above mechanism. Based on the memetic mechanism of brand nametranslation and analysis of a number of translation samples, the thesis proposes “threefavorables’ principles”, saying that the reconstruction of brand name meme coat should be favorable not only for the brand name meme to infect the receptor, for the receptor to decodethis meme accurately, but for the high-fidelity replication of the meme core as well. In addition,it also puts forward two translation strategies, namely the equivalent substitution strategy andthe homophonic allusion strategy. The latter can be further subcategorized into two methods asthe homophonic translation with transferred meaning and the homophonic translation withrendered meaning.Chiefly, the present thesis provides a tentative but original study of brand name translation,especially the process of brand name translation, from the memetic perspective and hopes that itwill shed some light on related scholars and translators for their further research.