Nowadays, more and more Chinese cosmetics brands are pushing out newproducts, which get the favorable reception from domestic consumers. And moreand more cosmetics company are going to make overseas arrangement. When theyare making the exports for the record, they need to register their brands’ Englishname. And there’s no doubt that a well-designed trademark is the first stepwhich can reveal the brand style, show the brand image and transmit the brand concept.If they want to leave the oversea users a deep impression, an excellenttranslation of trademark is necessary. But how to translate it becomes a largeproblem to the cosmeceutical manufactures.

Many of them just use the Chinese Pinyin as their English names. Most of translationsare meaningless to the oversea users, some of them are too hard to pronounceand some of them even have offensive meaning in the local languages.

Some cosmetics brands use the literal translation. That’s all right ifthe translation is easy to remember, elegant and meaningful. But most of thetime, the literal translation is not useful. For example, the most famous Chinesecosmetics brand DaoBao cannot be translated as big baby. Because the companygets its name from its founder and most of the products are not for baby. If weuse the literal translation in this case, maybe it will let the overseacustomers misunderstand.

When I was doing the research, I found out that the direct research oranalysis on this area is almost blank. Some researchers analyze the brandtranslation but not on cosmetics, some researchers do the analysis of the English-Chinesetranslation, etc. Estee Lauder, Lamer, Make up Forever…

And some researchers do the translationresearch from the angel of linguistic, like ASociolinguistic Study on the Trademarks Translation of Cosmetics by YuXin. Someresearchers do the translation research from the angel of aesthetic perspective,like A Study of Cosmetic Trademark Translationfrom Aesthetic Perspective by LiHui. And some researchers do thetranslation from the angel of some kind of translation theory, like functionalismand functional equivalence.

The translation of Chinese cosmetics brands isvery special because it contains two elements, one is brand and the other iscosmetics. There are different origins of the trademarks and different brandconcepts in different companies. Therefor we cannot use the single or settledtranslation theory for each Chinese cosmetics trademark’s translation. The translationmust be based on a lot of aspects.

As we all know, the translation standard is diverse. We need to redefineor recombination the existing translation theory and apply them to different brands. The most universal one is faithfulnessand smoothness, but it is not appropriate in the translation of cosmetics trademarks.And there are other translation standards. One of the most famous Chinese translatorYanFu came up with #8194;信、达、雅——faithfulness、expressiveness、elegance/gracefulness. Cosmetics is the pronoun of elegance in thefashion world. Therefore the elements of elegance is indispensable when we aredoing the cosmetics trademarks’ translations. And there are many kinds of translation theories and standards. Iwill analyze them, recombine them and apply them to the translation of Chinese cosmetics’trademark. The standardization of the Chinese-English translation of Chinesecosmetics brand trademark has a certain impact on customer popularity and the quantityof foreign trade orders.

2. 研究的基本内容与方案

Based on the translation theory, this paper will make a theoreticalanalysis and evaluation of the Chinese-English translation of domesticcosmetics brands, analyze the advantages and disadvantages of differenttranslation standards, and find out different translation standards which are suitablefor different cosmetics companies.

In terms of practical value, thispaper will put forward some suggestions on the English translation of trademarksthat have appeared on the international markets, as well as the translation ofbrand names that have not been appeared on the international markets.

This paper may provide trademark translation ideas for national cosmeticscompanies, which will make the English translation of domestic cosmetics morestandardized and help to improve the international recognition of nationalcosmetics, consumer preference, and improve the export volume of Chinese cosmetics.

1 Introduction