A Study On English Translation Of Chinese Geographical Indications: From The Perspective Of Language Planning

Geographical indications are names identifying quality products of a geographicalorigin, giving them specific qualities, characteristics and reputation. GI is recognizedworldwide as a new type of intellectual property rights under the Agreement on TradeRelated Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement) in1994. Since then, GIproducts are increasingly important in international trade, and become an important issuein the WTO Doha negotiations. China begins to protect GIs in2001. Due to theindependent and overlapping parallel systems of trademark protection under StateAdministration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC) and Sui generis protection underAdministration of Quality Supervision，Inspection and Quarantine(AQSIQ) and Ministryof Agriculture(MOA), the English translations of Chinese GIs are not unified. And thecondition becomes even worse for the neglect of the importance of GIs translation, lack ofguidance of translation theories and principles, careless examination of the GIs translations.This brings negative effects on the competitiveness of Chinese GI products in internationaltrade.This thesis explores the practice of GIs protection in European Union, the UnitedStates, and China. The nomenclature of GIs is discussed based on GIs definition. Thestatus quo of English translation of Chinese GIs is examined from the perspective oflanguage corpus planning under the guidance of Causal Historical Theory. The authorbuilds a Chinese-English corpus of Chinese GI product names and GIs trademarks basedon the data retrieved from the website of SAIC and Standardization Administration of thePeople’s Republic of China(SAC). After analyizing the data collected by the author, fivemajor problems in English translation of Chinese GIs are revealed, namely violation of theISO7098and GB／T16159—2012, the abuse of Chinese Romanization in renderingindication of goods, the mistranslation or ambiguous translation of indication of goods,one-name-multiple-translations in rendering GIs, and the ill formation and spelling errors.Three principles of GIs translation, namely coherence, standardization, and concept-priority, are proposed and demonstrated in case studies.