2.3.3 Consumer groups Features
In marketing, the trademark is an important promotional tool and a tool for achieving business objectives. From the market purchasing point of view, the purchasers may be individual consumers, enterprises or units and other organizations. In general, consumers are relatively sensitive to the brand name and most of them belong to the non-professional purchasing, therefore corporate promotion exerts such a great impact on these consumers. For example, the customers of daily products are generally housewives and the elderly. Therefore in the process of trademarks translations, one must design the trademark to meet the needs of such customers, based on the meaning of the trademark as well as the transmitted culture. On the other hand, business or organizations are more concerned about the technical parameters of products, prices, or other areas. These are categorized as professional purchases, thus for these customers, trademark translation have to shift focus again.
3. Intercultural Communication
3.1 An introduction to intercultural communication
Intercultural communication is a type of communication with the goals of exchanging information across different cultures and social communities. It has been described that the broad range of communication processes and problems that spontaneously occur within a group consists of individuals from diverse religion societies, ethnic groups, and educational backgrounds.( Larry A. Samavar,2012) Intercultural communication is sometimes known as cross-cultural communication, which seeks to comprehend how people from different countries and cultures behave, communicate and perceive the world around them. In a broader aspect, intercultural communication covers cross-cultural communication, international communication, developmental communication, and intercultural communication’s narrower referent, intercultural communication proper. In terms of intercultural communication proper, it investigates situations where people from different cultural backgrounds get along with. Apart from language, intercultural communication focuses on social factors, thinking patterns, and the cultures of different groups of people. It also encompasses understanding the cultural diversities, languages and customs of people from other countries. Intercultural communication plays an important role in social sciences such as anthropology, cultural studies, linguistics, psychology and communication studies.
As to international business transaction, intercultural communication works as the base for international businesses, offering an appropriate way to contact people with dissimilar groups of businessmen. There are several cultural differences to which businessmen have to pay attention giving the fact that the cultural shocks and misunderstandings happen frequently to intercontinental business, influencing the deal and long-term relationship established with business partners.
3.2 The significance of intercontinental communication in trademark translation
As stated before, the major function of trademark is to guide the marketing and branding of a brand. Such strategy does not only apply to information gathering process (from customers’ perspectives), but also helps brands to root in customers’ hearts throughout the whole selling process. Profiting with large sale of the products is the main goal of mature brands, but to achieve so requires establishing the whole brand culture of presenting inner cultural details of a brand. Intercontinental communication with trademark translation is the key method with which the brand culture may be correctly represented in other languages. The significance of intercontinental communication with trademark translation is not only expressed in translating but also proved in brand establishment.
The sales processes are divided into three steps of sales services, i.e., pre-sale service, sales process, and after-sale service. In the process of intercontinental trading business, the first information that customers may collect is the trademark of a brand, and this is referred as the pre-sale service. It is indeed difficult for naive customers to collect the whole set of branding culture of a product, whereas they could directly memorize the information about the trademark. In addition, as observed in real life, most Chinese customers will not have any emotional or behavioral reactions to the English name of a brand. For Chinese market and customers, the Chinese trademark translation develops and demonstrates the image of a brand. 跨文化商标翻译对市场营销的影响Trademark Translation(8):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_929.html