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

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

Have you seen the shirts that do the same thing with "Grateful Dead" anywhere?

ladymondegreen has one, and I know I've seen them on other people.

[cellio]

No, I haven't. That would be pretty funny.

Thus far most cases of this sort of thing that I've seen have been either ones where there's no translation (place names, for example) or ones where only part of a phrase translates (e.g. "New York" -- sure, you can translate "new", but then you're stuck).

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

A local store here sells caps that, in Hebrew, read "Mets" and "Yankees"