Trademark Translation From The Perspective Of Intercultural Pragmatics

As a symbol and name card of a manufacturer, a trademark plays a decisive role in the establishment and development of the brand. Under the increasingly severe situation, the problem manufacturers have to face is the competition of their brand values instead of the traditional competition of simple products and services. As the first name card to open the foreign market, trademark is one of the most significant factors, but also the primary factor to decide whether the manufacturer can win the competition in the market of foreign countries. There is a saying in Chinese business circle, “Brand is the power.”If a manufacturer intends to push into the foreign market, it should give top priority to the consideration whether their trademark is suitable to the target market. In most cases, the original trademark is named based on the local situation and cultural background, so those trademarks are not applicable for the foreign target market. The author makes an analysis on the current trademarks and discovers that trademarks often use proper names, lucky numbers, animals, plants, color, occupation, abbreviation or initials.Trademark translation is a rather complex process. In addition, the trademark has the features of identifying, information conveying, aesthetics, adaptability and modernity, so the trademark is endowed with the cultural pragmatic functions. According to the previous studies, the author discovers that there are six cultural pragmatic functions in trademark translation: identifying the products, promoting consumption, being a symbol of popularity, advertising function, establishing good reputation and delivering the product information.It is necessary for translators to pay more attention to the principles, process, cultural compatibility and evaluation criteria for the trademark translation. This paper is to discover the main problems in trademark translation from the perspective of intercultural pragmatics and put forward several practical strategies in two aspects based on the previous studies. One is the traditional translation methods: transliteration, literal translation and the combined translation. The other is the new-emerging translation methods: pragmatic compensation, aesthetic adaptability and zero translation. It is thought that the trademark translation will be studied from diversified directions, and the focus will be the exploration of cultural delivery and pragmatic functions.