An Exploration Of Brand Story Translation Strategies

A brand story is a story-type publicity text which takes brand as the its core.It provides consumers with narrative style and shows brand tone of voice,brand ideas,product introduction,corporate logo,and other brand-related content,thereby infusing brand marketing and communication with vitality.In response to the accelerated development of the digital age and economic globalization,all types of foreign brands have entered the Chinese market in an effort to accomplish successful cross-cultural brand marketing in China.Therefore,brand stories are increasingly utilized in the marketing strategies of these foreign brands,and the demand for their translation is also on the rise.So,brand story translation quality determines brand marketing and communication.From August to December of 2021,the writer interned as a translator for a well-known listed e-commerce company and completed the E-C brand story translation project,which includes the brand stories of over twenty beauty brands totaling over 20,000 words.Due to few bilingual brand story parallel texts available for references and the writer’s lack of beauty industry knowledge,the writer has encountered some difficulties when first translating brand stories.In order to accomplish the ultimate goal,which is to achieve the ST’s publicity effect in TT,it is often necessary for the writer to revise the translation repeatedly based on the feedback and revise suggestions from the company side until the translation finalizes.After the project completes,the writer reviews the whole translation practice process and summarizes four main brand story text features:flexible use of rhetorical devices,multiple imperative sentences,frequent use of adjectives,vivid descriptions of a story scene,etc.On the above basis,combined with Peter Newmark’s Text Typology Theory,other theories and the writer’s translation practice,the writer summarizes three strategies to improve the publicity effect in brand story translation:1)Adopting the strategy of language defamiliarization to locate brand tone of voice;2)Adopting certain translation techniques to highlight brand benefits;3)Adopting other strategies to improve the language appeal,and flexibly use a variety of translation methods based on the above three strategies to achieve publicity effect in brand story translation.With the help of this translation practice,the writer hopes to provide some referential brand story translation ideas for writers in specific sectors,and help these writers play critical roles in translating high-quality brand stories,thus promoting the brand marketing,expanding the brand product market,helping the brand bring in and go global and finally realizing the brand cross-cultural marketing and communication.