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

Re: "Bite the Wax Tadpole"

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

Yes, but the way it was explained to me, no one in Mexico would think that a car named "nova" would not go the same way that no one here thinks that a dining-room set called "notable" contains no table. The pronunciation and stress are different when they're spoken, and most people don't naturally mentally muck with words like that when they're in writing.