blogging venuti

"Two approaches are used in translating names for the huge Chinese market: to translate a name purely for phonetic effect, using pre-existing characters bereft of their original meanings; or to translate for both phonetic likeness and effective employment of the meanings of the Chinese characters. Examples of the former include: Motorola (moutuo-luo-la) and Exxon (Ai-ke-sen), whose translations are a sequence of characters that sound like the original name but do not have a sensible meaning in Chinese, and are thus read only as a sound. Examples of the latter include: Coca-Cola (ke-kou-ke-le, 'tasty and happy') and Colgate (gao-lu-jie, 'very clear and clean'), whose translations carry a selected meaning in Chinese, as well as sounding an approximation of the English original."



Laurence Venuti is talking at UCI right now about "Translation, Simulacra, Resistance: Translating against the Global Political Economy," and one of his references is a business school branding study that seeks to lay out strategies for effective translation of corporate brands. I cite once more from the above: "Past missteps in local naming for foreign markets have been disastrous and costly" - and the branding study goes on to suggest that "sound plus meaning" makes for a better brand... Huh - well, duh.



But it is not so easy to discern how a translator, or those who pay attention to the global effects of translation and the concomitant assumptions about meaning or communication, are able to carve out a space of resistance. Venuti suggests, looking at a Tom Clancy novel in Spanish, an Italian translation of the NYC rough guide, etc. that at least translators can "smuggle in" irony and shading.