linguistic oddity

[cellio]

I was surprised to see the following logo today:



I had assumed that, in general, when translating a business name with semantic content from one language to another, you would actually translate into the target language, rather than transliterating the phonemes in the source rendering.

I mean, it's one thing if your name is, say, "McDonald's"; that's just a person's name without an obvious corresponding word, so you'd just transliterate it. But "Burger King" has semantics that are lost in (this) translation, which makes me wonder why they did that when they didn't have to.

Comments

[geekosaur]

Because it's known by the sound of its name, not by the name's semantics.

[cellio]

In Israel?

[geekosaur]

Anywhere, pretty much; when I had TV and watched fútbol on Hispanic stations, *no* U.S. company translated its name into Spanish, but used its English name instead.

My understanding is that their servicemark is "Burger King", not the local translation of it (whether literal or idiomatic), so they need to transliterate instead of translating.

[cellio]

Ah, ok. That makes sense, I guess.