How to Protect Your Brand with Trademark Translation

What is a trademark definition? Your trademark can be many things. A trademark translation can be a symbol, element of design, or other signature attributes which uniquely identifies your products and services as your own. and such, trademarks can be applied to signs, brand names, logos, designs, taglines, and other visual elements that are unique to your company. In spite of this, there can still be issues that crop up with trademarked elements. this becomes even more complex when you have to translate one or more of your trademark elements into a different language.

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Understanding The Importance of a Name Identity: Trademark Definitions

To illustrate just how important trademarks are to a company’s recognition and identity, here are some examples of trademarks. As you can see trademark definition is quite flexible:

• Fictional Characters: ‘Jack’ From Jack in The Box or Tony the Tiger
• Business Names: UPS or IBM
• Words and Slogans in Specific Fonts: Pop Tarts or Little Debbie
• Colors: Barbie Pink or Tiffany Blue
• Slogans: ‘Just Do It’ by Nike
• Sounds: ‘Dun Dun’ Sound from The Law and Order TV Series
• Product Shapes: Toblerone Bar or Glass Coca Cola Bottle

Read also: Complex translations will be easily completed by technical manual translation services.

Establishing a Global Trademark

As you might imagine, establishing a trademark in your company’s country of origin doesn’t necessarily mean that your trademark is valid in other countries. If you expand your business internationally, you must establish your trademarks in each country you enter, or use the Madrid System to establish a trademark in multiple countries using a single application process.

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Trademark Translation

Of course, the importance of brand names and other trademarked items goes beyond establishing legal protections. You also have to present these elements to customers and potential customers in other countries, and it’s important that they make sense. They should also retain the definition intended.

Sometimes making that happen isn’t very easy. This is where translation and localization experts can help. One area that requires special attention is transliteration. This is the translation of written words from one language to another when the languages are based on two different character sets. For example, English and Chinese. There are no Chinese symbols that mean ‘coca or ‘cola’. For that matter, there are no Chinese symbols that translate to the 26 letter alphabet. Instead, each Chinese character has a sound and a meaning.

When Coca Cola began selling their products in China the first attempts at transliteration were a failure. One version could be translated as ‘bite the wax tadpole’. The company eventually settled on “ke kou ke le” which is Mandarin for a permit for the mouth to rejoice.

There are also instances where a phrase, character, even color simply won’t have the same meaning no matter what you do. In these cases, you may need to create something new in order to succeed in a new market. By working with professional English to Chinese translation services, you can identify these potential problems, and get advice on how to proceed.

In addition to this, when it is time to file for your trademarks, you can access translation professionals with experience in intellectual property law. They can assist you in translating any of the documentation required to protect your brand in other countries.

Useful information: How to find a professional patent translation agency?  

Final Thoughts

By trademarking your brand in other countries, you help your efforts to become recognized by your potential customers in those regions. You also help to ensure that your intellectual property is not taken by other companies for their own purposes. Just keep in mind that this can be a complicated undertaking. You will need to work with an online translation service with expertise in marketing, localization, intellectual property, and trademarks.