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.

[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.

[kayre]

My Hebrew is both minimal and rusty.. what, if anything does that translate to?

[dr4b]

They do it in Japanese too, if that helps... always transliterating, never translating.

Translations versus Transliterations

[lefkowitzga.livejournal.com]

Part of the issue may be that translations mean something that could be taken badly. There's a famous story about a commercial for some cola that it 'brings you back to life' which in whatever Asian language the ad was translated to meant that the drink was animating corpses.

Could you really see an accurate translation used for the name of most products? "Happily Endebted Corpse" or "Monarch of Ground Meat Patties" don't exactly scan from a marketing point of view... :)

[sdelmonte]

I don't know if there is a Hebrew word for hamburger. There technically isn't an English one, after all. So why bother translating at all?

[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.

[figmo.livejournal.com]

Back east I saw lots of folks with Hebrew "Coca Cola" t-shirts. It's transliterated, too.