A Functionalist Approach To The Translation Of Chinese Trademark Words

As enormous transformation has been taking place in the whole world because of theeconomic globalization, business and trade are inevitably becoming a part of theglobalization which results in the internationalization of trademarks. Hence, translation oftrademarks is also turning out to be of great importance in the exchanges of both economyand culture.In fact the translation of trademarks can be regarded as a kind of communicationbetween two cultures. What the translation of trademark deals with is various trademarkwords, but what it really confronts are two different cultures. That is to say, the translationof trademark is a cross-cultural activity. However, there are still many problems existing inthe current study and practice of the translation of trademarks, especially between theEnglish language and the Chinese language. Translators used to translate trademarks underthe guidance of traditional theories which put more emphasis on the principle offaithfulness in the form. For many years, the standards about faithful and equivalenttranslation held the dominant position in the field of translation. However, targetconsumers sometimes have some difficulty in understanding those translated trademarks,and that kind of translated trademarks may even lead target consumers to haveuncomfortable association. In recent years, with the rapid growth of world economy, therehave appeared some new phenomena in the translation practice of trademarks. Obviously,“faithfulness and equivalence” cannot meet the special demands of trademark translation.Thus, traditional translation theories seem increasingly inappropriate and a more practicaltheory is called for to guide the translation of trademarks. This thesis aims and attempts tofind the proper functionalist approach of the translation of the Chinese trademarks.Functionalist theory emerged in the1970s in Germany and was introduced into Chinaaround the1990s. This theory emphasizes the functions of the target texts in the target culture. The translator is regarded as an active expert in the process of the translation andhas the right to make full use of all kinds of information and to choose the mostappropriate method that can help achieve the expected functions of the target text.Therefore, functionalist theory can offer a satisfactory explanation for those target textsthat are not faithful or equivalent to the source texts. So it can be a proper theory to guidethe translation of trademarks.There are various problems in the current translation of trademarks, especially thetranslation of Chinese trademarks, such as inconformity with target cultures, inclusion ofambiguity and political connotations, inelegance of translated terms, and improper use ofChinese pinyin. So this thesis will resort to the functionalist theory to give proper solutionsto these problems. It will introduce the background, the development and the basicconcepts of the functionalist theory as well. And then the paper will apply the basicconcepts to the translation of trademarks by citing a great number of examples, and discussthe approaches of Chinese trademark translation from the perspective of functionalisttranslation theory.