On Foreign Cosmetic Brand Name Translation From The Perspective Of Skopostheorie

In recent years, with the deepening of economic reform, the open-door policy and accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), China’s economy has been developing rapidly. Numerous commodities, including various brands of cosmetic products, have been flooding into the Chinese market. Before entering into China’s market, foreign manufacturers must have their brand names translated into the target language in a way that can adapt to Chinese culture and aesthetics of the local consumers. Whether the quality of the translated brand names is good or not directly affects the image of the manufacturers and the sales of the product.In the1960s, the Equivalence Theory of Translation proposed by Eugene Nida states that the feature of the source text (ST) should be preserved in the target text (TT) so as to achieve the functional equivalence between the ST and the TT. However, with the emergence of Skopostheorie, translators do not take the source text as their center any more, but focus on translational skopos and the TT. As the core theory of Functionalism, Skopostheorie puts forward three principles, namely, the skopos rule, coherence rule and fidelity rule. In accordance with Skopostheorie, translation as a kind of cross-cultural action is guided by its (skopos) purpose, and translators should adopt the relative translational strategy in line with the skopos in the translational brief.A cosmetic brand name is an intangible asset of the producer, an identification and advertising tool of the product, and the guarantee of the product’s quality. A probable cosmetic brand name should be concise, able to arouse the consumers’positive association, and adapt to the psychology of potential customers in order to stimulate their desire to buy and increase the market share. To translate a high quality brand name, in addition to linguistic qualifications, a translator ought to have adequate knowledge about the target receivers, cultural diversity, trademark law, etc.The present study focuses on Chinese translation of foreign cosmetic brand names from the perspective of Skopostheorie. In the process of translating a brand name, corresponding translation strategies should be taken accordingly under the guidance of Skopostheorie, instead of being confined to the meaning and form of the original brand name. In this thesis, several translation strategies have been summarized on the basis of analysis of the collected foreign cosmetic brand names, namely transliteration, literal translation, combination of transliteration with literal translation, creative translation, zero translation and adaptation, and so on.The thesis begins with a brief introduction of the naming approaches and characteristics of cosmetic products. Then Skopostheorie is applied to analyze the translation brief of cosmetic brand names and target addressees, the qualification of the translators and the factors that should be considered when the brand names are being translated. Finally the thesis proposes several possible translation-strategies that might be adopted in translating foreign cosmetic brand names.