Strategies For Translating Trade Marks

The further opening-up of China and the consequent increase of foreign business activities have brought about a more diversified economic life for the Chinese and led to more demanding and challenging tasks and problems for translators in this field to tackle. For an increasing number of China-made and foreign-made products have been and are being exported out of and imported into, China and as each product bears its own trade mark or brand, how to translate them into Chinese or into a foreign language, say, English, and how to get a better, adequate and acceptable version of them is, therefore, of extreme importance in terms of the marketability of a particular product made in or outside China.With the present paper, the author discusses strategies employed in translating trade marks. And furthermore, to improve the translated trade marks with those techniques and skills, the author continues to explore certain problems arising from the trade mark translation and tries to put forward a few suggestions and solutions to them.The First Chapter studies and discusses 1. what trade marks are or are about; 2. how they came into being; 3. what are their functions in business and commerce; 4. how they are formed,; and 5. how many different kinds of them there are in general commercial practice and so on and so forth.The Second Chapter, on the basis of what has been discussed and studied on trade marks, consequently points out that, in translating trade marks, certain basic principles and criteria have to be abided by so as to be able to offer ideal versions of them. In this connection, the author surveys three different theories on translation at large to see if any translating strategies can be modeled on or be drawn upon. Among those theories, the author puts Chinese translation theorist, Yan Fu, and his trinity principle, namely "faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance", at the first place. Limitations as they have, the principles have been playing an important role in translation theories of China. Following that, the paper centers itself on Eugene A. Nida and Peter Newmark, the representatives of western translation theorists, and their respective theories. The core of Nida's theory is functional equivalence. He holds that translating consists inreproducing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the source language message, first in terms of meaning and secondly in terms of style(1969.13). Peter Newmark's great contribution is his discussion of semantic translation and communicative translation. He thinks that for the 'expressive texts', semantic translation should be applied while for the 'informative' and 'vocative texts', it is better to adopt communicative translation. Of course, all theories may have their limitations and we should treat them dialectically.In addition to the guiding principles and criteria mentioned above, translatability and untranslatability of trade mark translation should also deserve certain attention. Theoretically, there exists the channel for message transferring, which provides the translatability. However we can not deny and neglect that the differences between languages do bring about immense difficulties to the translators. Hence, we have to confess to the limitations of translatability. A Chinese scholar, Fu Zhongxuan, distinguishes limitations of translatability into absolute untranslatability and relative untranslatability. He holds that absolute untranslatability is resulted from the language differences while relative untranslatability refers to the temporary untranslatability caused by cultural differences.Bearing the above theories and strategies in mind, in the Third Chapter, the author advocates five techniques and skills for translating trade marks, from Chinese to English and vice versa, viz. transliteration, literal translation, free translation, semantic transliteration and coined translation.All those five strategies themselves are clear and easy to be understood. However, it would not be an easy task to make use of them skil...