Types of transliteration and/or translation

Question

There are cases where abbreviations or proper names like brands get transliterated/translated differently. This question is asking whether there are linguistic names for these phenomena, e.g.

• The brand Supreme translates to 至尊 in Chinese, it keeps the semantic meaning but the phonetic realization is different. Would this be a "semantic translation" of proper names?

• The brand Coca Cola translated to 可口可樂 in Chinese, it doesn't keep the literal semantic meaning but kept the phonetic similarities with some positive connotations added to the translation about being 可口 (Delicious) and 可樂 (Joyful). Would this be a "transliteration" with additional figurative semantic branding/marketing?

• The brand IKEA translated to 宜家 in Chinese, it keeps the phonetic similarities with additional semantic allusion to 家 (House/Furniture 家具) and 宜 meaning (Simple). Would this be some sort of transliteration with some transfer of literal semantics?

• The brand IBM translated to آئی بی ایم in Arabic, it spells out the acronym individually so that it phonetically matches. Is this some kind of "letter-fication"- transliteration?

• The brand Disney translated to ديزني in Arabic, it is made up of 2 syllables, ديز + ني to form the phonetic realization Dis + ney, Is this some kind of "syllabifcation" based transliteration?

Are there other types of proper name translations like the above?

Any reference to prior literature/paper that looks these different kind of translation/transliteration of proper names?

Answer 1

If they weren't trademarks but just plain borrowings, there is a very differentiated linguistic terminology, and I recommend the German wikipedia article Lehnwort as a starter, I think the Betz terminology is one of the finest grained ones available and known.

Trademarks are special in this respect since they are controlled by their respective owners and it is the owner's decision what to do with them. The native speakers of the target language have no vote on them.

Proper names often follow some traditions, from literal quotation (the norm in anglophone countries) to radical phonetic transcription (typical for Eastern European countries) or more or less regularised transcription from a foreign script (the norm for proper names from Russian and other languages with Cyrillic script). Some countries decree some standard Latin transcriptions for their languages (very successful with China, Russia insisting on a French-style transcription didn't succeed with that and gave up on this).

Answer 2

The translation of brand name text and advertising slogans is called transcreation.

That said, actual brand names are not usually translated. But even if they are, that is still transcreation.

Brand names are like poetry: There are two choices. Either you keep the sound (prosody) or you work with the meaning to create something in the L2 that works for those speakers.

Transcreation is a term coined from the words "translation" and "creation", and a concept used in the field of translation studies to describe the process of adapting a message from one language to another, while maintaining its intent, style, tone, and context. A successfully transcreated message evokes the same emotions and carries the same implications in the target language as it does in the source language. It is related to the concept of localization, which similarly involves comprehensively adapting a translated text for the target audience.1 Transcreation highlights the translator's creative role.[2] Unlike many other forms of translation, transcreation also often involves adapting not only words, but video and images to the target audience.

transcreation