Translation and Marketing Policies: How Chinese Food Products Are Selling in Barcelona

Success of food products trying to reach new foreign markets depends on how these items are presented in the target culture. There are different factors to be taken into account and translation is without any doubt among the most important ones. As it was explained in Fox (1995) "competent translation ensures the successful entry of a company's goods into a foreign market; incompetent translation spells disaster". This paper analyzes the translations of the labeling of Chinese foodstuffs, new in the Barcelona market. Our aim is to describe the translation method as well as to explain the framework of circumstances and purposes in relation with product underlying the choice of a particular translation method. We depart from the hypothesis that the translation methods applied are based on two fundamental axes: one is the linguistic policy of the target country (Catalonia in this case) and the other is the target customer.