E-C Translation Of Coffee Brand Names:a Perspective Of Relevance Translation Theory

In recent decades, with the globalization of economy and the improvement of living standard, coffee becomes more and more popular in China. As for the Chinese consumers, coffee brand name is the most direct way to learn about the product itself. The quality of Chinese versions of English coffee brand names will substantially influence the choice of the target consumer. Brand name translation is one of interlingual, intercultural communicative activities. As the mediator, the translator plays an important role. It turns out to be a difficult task for the translator to effectively present the characteristics of the product, stimulate the purchasing desire of the target consumer and ultimately improve production sales and promotion.Under the framework of Relevance Translation Theory, the author analyzes the collected English coffee brand names as well as their Chinese versions and investigates the psychological mechanism of the translator in the process of employing translation principles and methods, in the hope of finding a new research angle for brand name translation. Qualitative methodology is employed in this research. According to Relevance Translation Theory, translation can be considered as one of interlingual, intercultural communicative activities, and this theory is powerful enough to account for brand name translation. The mental faculty of the translator is of great importance in the translating process for the translator has to carefully analyze the cognitive environment of the original author and the target reader and then finds out factors influencing the pursuit of optimal relevance. On this basis, the translator is able to employ appropriate translation principles and flexibly apply related translation methods. Under the framework of Relevance Translation Theory, brand name translation can be considered as two ostensive-inferential communicative processes, that is, two relevance-seeking processes, involving the original brand name designer, the translator and the target consumer. Due to the sharp cognitive differences, the original designer cannot communicate directly with the target consumer. As the mediator of the communication between the original designer and the target consumer, the translator has to comprehensively analyze and evaluate the cognitive environment of both the original designer and the target consumer. In the first process, the translator infers the original designer’s informative intention in accordance with the source cognitive environment, the original brand name and the principle of relevance. The ultimate goal of the translator in this process is to find out the optimal relevance between the original brand name and the source cognitive environment. In the second process, the translator thoroughly analyzes the factors influencing brand name translation and takes the target consumer’s expectations and acceptability into consideration. Then the translator employs translation principles and methods appropriate to brand name translation. The translator has to constitute a new optimal relevance between the translated brand name and the target cognitive environment in order to effectively convey the original designer’s communicative intention in the end.After analyzing the psychological mechanism of the translator in the process of making translation strategies, the author finds that when dealing with coffee brand name translation, the translator primarily follows three translation principles, namely, the relevance-oriented principle, the principle of simplicity and the consumer-oriented principle. As for the target consumer, the pronunciation and the associated relevance of the translated coffee brand names is the most direct way to know the product, therefore, the relevance-oriented principle is the primary one. A brand name has the characteristic of simplicity so the translator should select concise diction which also has connection with the associated relevance of the translated brand names. Since the products are consumer-oriented, the translator also resorts to the consumer-oriented principle to make the translated brand names meet the acceptability and expectations of the target consumer. Under the guidance of the three principles, the translator can flexibly employ corresponding translations methods. The four translation methods primarily employed by the translator include literal translation, transliteration, adaptive translation and transliteration plus literal translation.