Dear Suhail,
Business-wise, I think it is a mistake to use transliteration in advertising since it actually excludes the natives if they happen not to know about the meaning of the transliterated material in the ad. I have seen a lot of successful bilingual ads, however.
If you are working something on it, let's discuss.
In my view, transliteration disrupts the advertising meaning in different culture. Once has to take care of cultural dimensions.
When Coca-Cola was first sold in China in 1927, it became necessary to transliterate the name into Chinese characters: this entailed finding the nearest phonetic equivalents, or one Chinese character for each of the four syllables. (Each character has a meaning.) Altogether, there are more than 50,000 characters (of which about 20,000 are in daily use); about 200 were pronounced with sounds approximating what was needed but many of these were ruled out because of their meaning. And so, in Mandarin, "kĕ kŏu kĕ lè" (可口可乐) was chosen to literally mean “to allow the mouth to be able to rejoice”, aka "delicious happiness"; many Chinese consider this a perfect translation.
Dear Prof. Papakonstantinidis,
Thank you for your elaborated addition to the question.Transliteration, though it has negative effects, it could help trigger brand awareness in a multicultural society. If the same/previous campaign is transliterated in relevant cultural contexts, it could generate an enhanced response which could be sales booster to the companies.
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