Linguistic Challenges in Translation: Rendering Brand and Organization Names from Persian to English

The growth of economic, cultural, and political exchanges among different countries has led to the formation of new scopes in the translation profession. The legal and political significance of organizational titles and commercial brands has caused the translation of these elements to be in need of extreme precision and dependent upon particular linguistic and technical considerations. The present study is a field research with a linguistic perspective on the translation of brand and organization names from Persian to English. While analysing the syntactic structure of such names and presenting different methods for their translation, a new classification of translator errors in rendering such structures is provided. The results indicate that four types of error are more common, namely: 1. mistaking a proper noun for a common noun and the reverse, 2. grammatical mistakes, 3. combined errors (grammatical & lexical) and 4. lexical errors. The findings also reveal that the recognition of the linguistic elements forming organizational and brand names, especially the combination of proper and common names, knowing the international conventions in their translation, as well as attention to cultural considerations are preconditions of an appropriate translation of such titles, and translators should receive special training in this regard.