By any other name: A study of brand name transfer from English-language to Russian-language printed advertisements

The brand name is one of the most important devices for marketing a product. Western companies spend vast sums of money devising brand names that convey the positive characteristics of products marketed on the strength of their image. Many of the brand names patented are complex linguistic units, using aspects of phonology, orthography, morphology, syntax and semantics to make names memorable. These names use language to impact on readers and therefore have transferable meanings. This article analyses the linguistic devices in a corpus of English language adverts and investigates which translation strategies are employed when the adverts are transferred into Russian. It argues that the transfer process is more complex than previous literature has suggested and that although the original meaning is often not maintained after transfer, brand names in the target adverts carry new connotations which are appealing due to the target audience’s expectations.