Abstract

The quality of a brand name plays an important role in promoting products and service. Now with more and more enterprises entering the international market, a metaphorical perspective plays an important role in making brand names. But what most scholars have done is just describing the 1inguistic phenomenon, rather than explaining the underlying mechanism of conceptual metaphor.
0wing to the limitations of the previous studies and the significance of brand names in the market economy, this thesis attempts to inquire into whether those chosen examples of Chinese brand names have gained successful translations with resort to the conceptual metaphor theory or not. From the theoretical point of view, with the theory of conceptual metaphor translated by quantitative analyzing Chinese brand name, the author want to prove the rationality of the combination of conceptual metaphor theory and brand names. It serves as an overall and specific analysis about the Chinese-English brand name translation in the perspective of brand name naming, features and functions of brand names, criteria of C-E brand name translation, and conceptual metaphors in brand names and so on. Three situations are firstly classified according to whether metaphors are entailed and whether metaphors in the original conform with that in the translated version, i.e. (a) metaphors cannot be found in the original brand names but appear after translation;(b) metaphors are entailed in original brand names but disappear after translation;(c) metaphors can be both found in the original brand names and in the translated versions.
By using anglicizing in this thesis, the author finally makes conclusion about some conceptual metaphors which are used in Chinese and English brand names and some feasible suggestions and enlightening thoughts are given to the companies for the case in which they name or translate brand names into English versions. The innovation and significance of this thesis are: (1) English and Chinese brand should be guided by conceptual metaphor theory; (2) conceptual metaphor theories are testified as effective cognitive tools for brand names interpretation and open new approaches to brand names researches.

Keywords:  conceptual metaphors  brand names  Chinese-English translation

摘要

商标名的好坏对企业产品推广有重要意义,随着越来越多的中国企业开始走向国际市场,概念隐喻思维在商品命名过程中发挥了重要的作用。之前的考虑大部分仅停留在描述的层面上,鲜有触及到该现象背后的概念隐喻。
鉴于上述研究的不足及商标词在市场经济中日益增长的重要性,从概念隐喻理论的角度,通过定量分析中国商标名的英译名,我们要证明概念隐喻理论和品牌组合的合理性,并对中国商标英译名的特点、功能及标准进行全面、具体的分析。本课题将通过概念隐喻这一认知语言学理论来探讨中国商标英译名的优与劣,按照翻译先后商标名是不是包括概念隐喻以及蕴含的概念隐喻是否等同,从汉语中带,翻译后不带;汉语中不带,翻译后带；汉语中带,翻译后也带三个角度展开研究。
通过本文分析,作者总结了一些关于概念隐喻用于中国商标名英译名的一些切实可行的建议和启发性的思考。本文的创新和意义在于：（1）揭示了概念隐喻理论与中国商标英译相结合的合理性；(2)证明了概念隐喻理论是商标英译名命名的有效认知工具并为商标名命名的一些指导原则提供了中国商标英译的新思路。

关键词： 概念隐喻；商标名；汉英翻译