Author(s)

Lu Wenchan

Corresponding Author

Lu Wenchan

Abstract

In the age of economic globalization, the communications between human beings are more frequent, and the trends of Chinese-western trade have increased greatly. In the process of international trade transactions, the brand name takes an immeasurable, as well as an irreplaceable part. Brand name, the image representative of the product and the company, is the direct element to attract the customers’ attention and evoke their desire to buy the products, which is the key to the sales volume. However, for the different social ideology, customs and habits, aesthetic psychology, and value, the translation processes are often hindered. From the perspective of cross-cultural communication, this paper aims at analyzing the specific cultural differences of the brand name, finding out the factors causing the differences and giving a series of proper solutions to deal with these thorny problems. What’s more, this paper has collected quite a number of Chinese-English brand names, aims at comparing the source language brand name and the target language brand name, and has found out some deficiencies, like direct translations without considering the cultural factors. For these problems, this paper puts forward several translation principles and methods under the guidance of Eugene A. Nida’s functional equivalence theory from the cultural viewpoint in order to give a reference to the Chinese-English brand name translation.

Keywords

Brand name, Cultural differences, Translation methods.