Chinese-English Advertising Translation Guided By Functionalist Approaches

Advertisements can be seen everywhere in the commercial society. With the economic globalization, products from different countries are competing in the international markets. With the rapid development of Chinese economy and the enforcement of the policy of "Reform and Opening-up to the outside world", as well as China entering WTO, more and more Chinese products are exported to English-speaking countries. As a main method of promoting sales, advertising plays a more and more important role. Then the English translation of Chinese advertisements is more significant and indispensable. The traditional equivalence-based linguistic theory cannot fulfill the function of advertising English. As a special text type, the purpose of advertising is to persuade the audience to get action to buy the products or services advertised. The objective of advertising translation is also like this. Therefore, a new translation theory is called for to guide advertising translation. Functionalist translation theories put forward by some German scholars in the 1970s has opened up a new perspective to translation studies. It reflects a general shift from predominantly linguistic and rather formal translation theories to a more functionally and socioculturally oriented concept of translation. It regards translation as an action which has a certain skopos. This purpose determines the whole process of translation. That is, the end justifies the means. The translation strategies should be under the guidance of the expected translation purpose. Besides, there are still two other principles in functionalist translation theories. That is coherence rule and fidelity rule. These two rules are subordinate to the skopos rule. The main concepts of functionalist approaches have significant meaning to advertising translation. Advertising translation not only deals with language, but also the culture. There are many differences between Chinese advertising and English advertising at linguistic and cultural levels. In the course of Chinese-English advertising translation, the linguistic and culture features of English advertising have to be observed carefully in order to cater to the English readership's psychological needs and expectations. This thesis takes functionalist translation theories as a theoretical framework. It discusses the linguistic and cultural features of English advertising after explaining the purpose and functions of advertising. The English translation of Chinese advertising must consider these elements. Direct translation and adaptive translation are the main strategies that are commonly used in this process, especially the latter one. However, it has to point out that it does not mean one strategy is more important than the other one. They have their own advantages in different situations. Besides these, this thesis points out that a translator plays a creative role in the translation process.