A Strategic Analysis of the Translations of Brands and Company Names: Relevance to Varied Equivalences and Textual Functions

• Main Authors: Hui-mei Tseng, 曾惠美
• Other Authors: Chung-ling Shih
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/e3442r

碩士 === 國立高雄第一科技大學 === 應用英語系口筆譯碩士班 === 103 === This research is conducted to identify the strategic differences in the translations of famous company names and product brands, and explore their relevance to varied equivalences and textual functions. Five strategies are used as analysis criteria, including 1) transcription of the original, 2) transliteration, 3) situational or cultural adequacy, 4) creation, and 5) hybrid rendition. Hans J. Vermeer’s Skopos theory (1989/2004) and Katharina Reiss’ text typology theory (1981/2004) are adopted as research framework to support the correlation between strategic use and textual functions. Consulting some translation equivalence theories, the author modifies equivalence into three types: a) strong equivalence, b) fair equivalence, and c) weak equivalence, in order to analyze the correlation between strategic use and equivalence. The findings of strategic analysis indicate that all the translations of company names and brands use transliteration (40%~48%) and hybrid rendition (28%~34%) most frequently. This suggests that the translations of company/brand names often lead to the fair equivalence between SL and TL, and that a brand/company name is neither always translated literally nor always freely rendered out of the translator’s pure creation. Additionally, from the perspective of textual function, the analytical results show that in the translations of company names, transliteration (48%) ranks higher than it does in the translations of other two categories because many company names use personal names. Moreover, in the translations of food product brands, transcription of the original (10%) ranks higher than it does in the translations of other two categories. The reason is that food products brands tend to be literally translated to show food information, such as food ingredients, food types or food product images that their companies intend to create. In the brand name translations of household goods, creation (24%) ranks higher than those of other two categories because the brand name translations of household goods tend to show after-use effects by adding appealing words that do not exist in the source texts. As a result, the employment of different strategies aims to fulfill different textual functions of the brand names in each category, either to inform and/or to attract the target audience. It is not always necessary to use a fixed strategy for translating brands and company names, but oftentimes to modify the strategies depending on the intended functions of the translations.