On Advertising Translation In The Light Of German Functionalist Approaches

In modern society, the rapid progress of economy, the intensification of international exchanges and severe competition involve a growing need for advertising and thus of its translation. However, the study of advertising translation is far from satisfactory and traditional translation theories seem increasingly inadequate.Therefore, this study aims to form a solid theoretical framework for advertising translation study, so as to bridge the gap between the abundant practice and a not-yet-adequately-researched discipline of advertising translation. Furthermore, it makes an attempt to analyze a corpus of authentic materials to find out how specific the advertisements are translated in the context of international advertising, and expect to highlight the external factors involved in the translation process.Based on the description and analysis, we arrive at the following conclusions. As a language for special purpose, advertising language has its unique stylistic characteristics, which determines that advertising translation should have its own principles, criteria and approaches. And advertising language should be studied in terms of not only surface structure but also intrinsic mechanism.Advertising translation distinguishes itself from other types of translation by boasting its own notions, such as the role of the translator, the role of source text and the translation criteria, etc. Due to the nature of advertising, advertising translation is affected by many parameters, internal and external. It is not just a SL-TL linguistic operation, but often an adaptation process according to the factors of the target culture. To accomplish their missions, ad translators should keep themselves aware of these parameters, predict the problems and adopt appropriate strategies in translation practice.This thesis is divided into five chapters. The first is the introduction.Chapter II deals with the literature review. It begins with pointing out the inadequacy of the traditional approaches to advertising translation, and then moves on to the explanation of feasibility of functionalist translation approaches. Moreover, the previous studies of advertising translation are discussed.Chapter 3 focuses on the analysis of advertising language with a comparison between Chinese and English advertisements in terms of the intrinsic mechanism of each linguistic system, cultural background, thought patterns, etc.Chapter IV deals with the analysis of advertising translation in the light of functionalist approach supplemented with the methodology of DTS. The whole analysis procedure involves two stages: the discovery stage and the justification stage. Based on such an analysis, implication on teaching and translation quality assessment is put forward.Chapter V summarizes the major findings of the research and points out the limitations of the present research as well as some suggestions for the future study.