Brand Name Translation From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory And Psychological Distance

With China's deepening of reform and opening up and economic globalization,more and more foreign brands choose to enter the Chinese market.These global brands have gradually penetrated into the daily lives of Chinese consumers,influencing their consumption habits by providing a wide range of choices.For companies,brand name is a key part of the corporate value.Under the guidance of localization,brand managers tend to translate the brand names into Chinese as a marketing strategy to deal with the language and cultural differences in the local market.They think,by doing this,their brands are better recognized by Chinese consumers,thus creating more commercial value.For individuals,not only the products themselves,but also the metaphors of meaning behind the brand names,phonetic symbolism,morphological associations,etc.,affect consumer behavior.However,how to better translate a brand name,as part of corporate equity,has plagued many practitioners.Traditional translation methods like transliteration and literal translation are no longer enough to meet the changing needs of brand marketing.Therefore,researchers began to resort to interdisciplinary theories,including the Relevance Theory from pragmatics and psychological distance in cognitive psychology.Yet the study of Relevance Theory in the translation of brand names is scarce and mostly limited to optimizing translation strategies;while psychological distance has been widely used in consumer psychology study,research on its influence on the relationship between brand names and consumers is also limited.The thesis explores the principles of brand name translation and the psychological mechanisms of brand name acceptance from the perspective of Relevance Theory,and proposes to translate brand names in a way that achieves the optimal relevance in terms of sound,semantics and morphological form.At the same time,this thesis suggests that the optimal relevance through appropriate brand name translation can minimize the psychological distance from the brand name to the consumer,thereby maximizing the recognition of brand name and promoting consumption.