English-Chinese Translation Strategies Of Cosmetics Brand Names: A Contextual Adaptative Approach

Selecting a proper name for a brand, which tries to enter into Chinese market, always draws intense attention of foreign brands. However, although many researches have been conducted on cosmetics brand name translation, there lacks scientific and systematic exploration in identifying specific translation strategies and proposing general translation strategies with quantitative and qualitative approaches.With quantitative and qualitative approaches, this thesis investigated linguistic features of English cosmetics brand names and their Chinese translations on the basis of 166 E-C cosmetics brand name translation examples, and identified specific and general translation strategies employed. And then this thesis discussed contextual factors affecting the employment of translation strategies in E-C cosmetics brand name translation. Accordingly, this thesis proposed general translation strategies for cosmetics brand name translation from the perspective of contextual adaptation, in order to shed a light on selecting effective brand name translations when foreign cosmetics brands market into China or Chinese brands market into foreign countries or territories successfully.Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, this thesis concludes: firstly, considering phonetic and semantic perspectives, specific cosmetics brand name translation strategies can be classified into transliteration, which could be further divided into pure transliteration and partial transliteration according to the degree of phonetic similarity between original brand names and Chinese translations, and free translation; what's more, according to the meaning of characters chosen in Chinese translations, pure transliteration can be divided into pure transliteration without named meaning and pure transliteration with named meaning, partial transliteration can be divided into partial transliteration without named meaning, partial transliteration with literal meaning and partial transliteration with named meaning, and free translation can be divided into free translation with literal meaning, free translation with named meaning and free translation with literal and named meaning. Secondly, from the perspective of contextual adaptation, effective E-C cosmetics brand name translation should adopt general translation strategies of adapting to cultural context, adapting to marketing context and adapting to linguistic context. Adapting to marketing context can be further classified into adapting to industry or product attributes, adapting to target consumers and adapting to brand marketing strategy. And adapting to linguistic context can be further classified into adapting to pronunciation and adapting to meanings.