Abstract:Trademarks are playing a more and more important role in commercial communication and competition. Trademarks, as special linguistic signs, are the core part of the commercial culture and mighty weapons in international competition involving all enterprises. Trademarks are not only symbols but also baits to attract consumers and sell products. A good translated brand name will bring companies considerate interests. Otherwise, a terrible one will make companies suffer severe failures. So translations of trademarks have a close bone with companies’ future. At the same time, translation is also a process of transferring cultures between two countries and the cultural distinctions determine the differences of thinking models, aesthetic values and consumption values when people deal with trademarks. Therefore, translators have to translate trademarks from intercultural perspective and fully take cultural distinctions into consideration and finally finish the translating work perfectly. Sine 1990s, many scholars have conducted lots of researches on translation theories of trademarks, domestic and overseas and also contributed many famous classical theories. This paper, based on these classical theories, will analyze how cultural distinctions impact trademark translation. Besides, this paper will also list phenomena of cultural distinctions in trademark translation and examples of bad translations which ignore the differences between cultures. Under the guidance of these phenomena and examples, I try to find out some translation strategies and methods to avoid the conflictions resulted from cultural distinctions, such as transliteration, free translation, literal translation and other new methods. Meanwhile, I will sum up some significant principles and rules or translation. This essay is supposed to get conclusions that will be beneficial to researches on trademark translation and aimed to serve trademark translation better as well as sales.

Keywords: trademarks translation; cultural distinctions; intercultural communication

Contents

Abstract

中文摘要

Chapter 1 Introduction-1

Chapter 2 Cultural Issues on Trademarks-3

2.1 Intercultural Factors in Trademarks-3

2.2 Similarities of Chinese and English Trademarks-3

2.2.1 Key principle----Easy to ead, understand, remember and spread-3

2.2.2 Pursuing good fortunes-3

2.2.3 The symbolic meaning-3

2.3 Differences Between Chinese and English Trademarks-4

2.3.1 Chinese: internal meaning;    English: external image-4

2.3.2 Chinese: elegance;    English: fact and reality-4

2.3.3 Chinese: fame;    English: love and feeling-4

2.4 Localization and Internalization of Trademarks-5

Chapter 3 Theories and Methods on Trademark Translation-7

3.1 The Three-beauty Theory in Trademark Translation-7

3.2 Principles and Methods of Trademark Translation-8

3.2.1 Good for promotion-----the beauty in sound-8

3.2.2 Good for highlighting the connotation------the beauty in meaning-9

3.2.3 Creative translation------the beauty in image-10

Chapter 4 Translation of Trademarks-13

4.1 The Importance of Trademark Translation-13

4.2 Analyses on Successful Cases: English into Chinese-13

4.3 Analyses on Successful Cases: Chinese into English-13

4.4 Notes and Tips for Trademark Translation-14

4.4.1 To know the language culture of target consumers-14

4.4.2 Attentions to the preference and taboo of different nations-14

Chapter 5 Conclusion-17

References-19

Acknowledgements-20