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

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

At the risk of inspiring Pulp Fiction quotes, it's interesting to watch how things like "Quarter Pounder" (the McDonalds hamburger) get translated in the vast majority of the world that uses metric measures.

Per the quote I alluded to, it's supposedly a "Royale" in France. In Brazil, IIRC, it was a "Quartero", which plays on the "quarter" sound but doesn't actually say one quarter of what.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

It's 'Royale' in Germany as well (but it's a quarter-pounder with cheese, they don't seem to do it without cheese). Note that the back-derivation 'burger' for an patty of unnamed meat (named meat costs more) is incorrect, as are the derivations from that like 'beefburger', since the hamburger was named after the place Hamburg (but apparently one in America, not the German one). Not that this stops Burger King (or as an SCA article had it, Borgia King)...