摘要

随着“经济全球化”趋势不断加深，中国与世界各国，尤其与西方发达经济体的经贸往来日益密切。而在商标翻译过程中，有些只注重从1）某些具体翻译方法、2）商标本身特性、以及3）商品特点等某一单独、孤立视角出发，却忽视了原商标所蕴含的文化意象的翻译和影响，导致他国市场消费者难以理解和接受，最终致使产品无法打开国际市场。如欲进入英国消费市场的电池商标 “白象”（“White Elephant”）就是个忽视文化意象翻译的典型字面翻译案例。
本文从关联论视角出发，对商标文化意象进行分析，研究发现1）商标文化意象翻译，作为商标翻译的重要部分，是一个跨文化交际的过程；一个寻找最佳关联的过程；一个明示与推理的过程。同时，2）商标文化意象翻译也需要通过满足外国消费者来自本国文化的心理期待和需求，从而实现商标翻译“劝说”购买的功能。本文通过对不同文化意象分类，以及运用上述所提到的理论进行案例分析，从而达到“学以致用”的目的。因而本文对涉及跨文化交际领域的商标文化意象翻译具有一定的参考意义。

关键词：关联论；商标翻译；文化意象翻译

Abstract

With the trend of deepening economic globalization, China has an increasingly close relationship on economic cooperation and trade exchanges with many other countries, especially the Western developed economies. Nevertheless, from a single and isolated perspective of either 1) The application of some specific translation methods; or 2) The study of the features of brand names; or 3) The research of the characteristics of the commodity itself, some translators during the process of brand names translation are probable to ignore both the appropriate translation and the important significance of culture images implied by the original brand names, which leads to its potential consumers’ misunderstanding and refuse at the foreign market and ultimately results in a severe setback of exploiting the international market. For instance, a battery brand name called “白象” in Chinese was once translated semantically into “White Elephant” in English when its company wanted to enter the U.K. market, which was a typical literal translation with ignorance of the culture image translation.
From the perspective of the Relevance Theory, this article discovers that 1) Culture images translation, as a principal portion of the brand names translation, is a process of cross-culture communication, a process of searching for optimal relevance and a process of ostension and inference. What’s more 2) Culture images translation plays a great role in the function of fulfilling persuasion of brand names through satisfying foreign consumers’ psychological expectation connected with their cultural environment. Finally, the ultimate goal of “knowledge serving practice” can be achieved in this article via classification of culture images of different categories, and application of these knowledge mentioned into cases study. Therefore, this paper, to some extent, can be a reference for culture images translation in brand names involving the field of cross-culture communication.

Key words: Relevance Theory; brand names translation; culture images translation