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

An Israeli variation in that....

[shmuelisms.livejournal.com]

In Israel the Korean car maker KIA (pronounced Ki-a), while using the same name spelling, logos and all, has the name pronounced as KAYA. This being due to Kee meaning vomit in Hebrew <== not something you want associated with your product, is it? This too, may be an urban legend, but I checked the pronunciation in the KIA FAQ (http://www.kia.com/faq.shtml#mean), and facts seem to line-up.

[International] Brand Names in Hebrew are almost always transliterations, after all, from a marketing point of view, you want to keep the Brand Name recognition.

You don't know me. I was just passing through.

Re: An Israeli variation in that....

[cellio]

Ooh, yes. "Our car prompts motion sickness" isn't exactly the message they'd want to send. :-)

You don't know me. I was just passing through.

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