Testing to prevent bad translation: Brand name conversions in Chinese-English contexts

Doreen Kum, Yih Hwai Lee and Cheng Qiu

Journal of Business Research, 2011, vol. 64, issue 6, 594-600

Abstract: This research investigates bilingual consumers' evaluation of brand name translations from logographic-Chinese to alphabetic-English language systems. The research examines four possible methods of translation -- semantic, phonetic, phonosemantic and Hanyu Pinyin. Consumers' chronic differences in language proficiency levels and the presence of situational primes relating to phonological or semantic processing jointly influence preferences for the translation methods. In addition to findings consistent with the premise that phonological/semantic processing is effective in alphabetic/logographic languages, this research shows that consumers who are strong in Chinese and weak in English prefer Pinyin translations across all conditions.

Keywords: Translation; preference; Bilinguals; Language; proficiency; Priming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148-2963(10)00120-7
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbrese:v:64:y:2011:i:6:p:594-600

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Research is currently edited by A. G. Woodside

More articles in Journal of Business Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().