Ingrid, at her Language On the Move blog, posts about an interesting M.A. thesis that studied the translation of brand names into Arabic. Money quote:
...basically, he’s saying that the entire target population of an advertising message doesn’t get it. Small wonder that Arabic speakers often gripe about the way the Arabic language has become “infested” (Al Agha’s term; p. 82) with English. Al Agha notes that the preferred “translation” strategy in his corpus of Saudi fast-food ads is transliteration rather than translation.
Having worked in the international branding industry (for an ever so brief amount of time), I can attest to the issues and problems that arise that Ingrid discusses further, and they are indeed non-trivial. It's a good read.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
-
The commenters over at Liberman's post Apico-labials in English all clearly prefer the spelling syncing , but I find it just weird look... -
(image from Slate.com ) I tend to avoid Slate.com these days because, frankly, I typically find myself scoffing at some idiot article they&... -
Matt Damon's latest hit movie Elysium has a few linguistic oddities worth pointing out. The film takes place in a dystopian future set i...
No comments:
Post a Comment