On Translation Of English Brand Names-From The Perspective Of David Katan's Chunking Theory

With the enlargement of production and prosperity of global trade, new foreign products and services flood into Chinese market everyday. Translating the English brand names for these foreign products and services to enable the Chinese customers to familiarize with and accept them is thereby practically significant. In the meantime, among Chinese translators and translation researchers, there have been wide and heated discussions on brand name translation (BNT). Whereas there are problems in both the practice and study of BNT which entails further study on English BNT.Translation is not only the interpretation of meaning, but also a cognitive creation of understanding and creating "frames" (an internal psychological state which makes up part of our mental map of the world). A natural and ingenious method to realize the interpretation of meaning and cognitive creation is chunking. This also applies to English brand name translation (BNT). And this paper is an attempt to study English BNT from this new perspective. The theoretical framework adopted in this paper is chunking theory (Katan, 2004), a relatively new translation theory derived from chunking strategy frequently adopted by Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) experts, which integrates the interpretation of meaning with the understanding and creating frames. Starting with the reflection on the nature of BNT, the author then conducts an exploration into the origin of chunking theory, the theoretic support of it and the models of applying this theory to BNT. After the exploration, several examples of chunking to translate English brand names are provided to test the feasibility of applying this new theory to English BNT.The findings of the study manifests that a good translator should not only have the ability to analyze the semantic constructs, but also the ability to understand and shift the frames between cultures, and that successful brand name translation should open up in the target culture the same frames as those which are opened up by the original brand name in the source culture. This suggests that the translator's ability to understand and create proper frames both in the source and target cultures is of great importance in translation. Translator's acquisition of this ability can be achieved by exercising chunking and familiarizing himself with both source and target cultures. Besides the ease of application, a greater advantage of chunking is that each move of this procedural operation is governed by certain translation theory or notion and bespeaks them, hence avoids the separation of theory from practice resulting from the overly general and broad theoretical framework, which is not rarely seen in the existing BNT in China.This study is significant in that it studies BNT from a completely new perspective. And unlike other studies on BNT, the theoretical framework adopted by this study is not too general and broad to govern the study on BNT, which is a rather practical activity. The insights gained from this study make us re-examine translation's nature as interpretation of meaning and make the translators realize the necessity and importance of increasing their cultural awareness. Finally, the findings of this study may also provide practical assistance for improving the quality of English BNT.