Study Of Advertisement Translation: The Perspective Of Functionalism Theory

With the rapid development of international business and multinational companies there is a growing need for efficient international advertising communication and translation. The amount of advertising translation is already substantial, and keeps increasing. However, incommensurate with its importance in cross-cultural communication, advertising translation is still an underexplored field, which has not yet been adequately studied in the discipline of translation.This thesis 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 advertisement, and expect to highlight the external factors involved in the translation process.As a branch of translation study, advertising translation has its own laws and demands a systematic study. Advertising language is for special purpose, so it 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 advertisement, 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. In order to accomplish their missions, advertising translators should keep themselves aware of these parameters, predict the problems and adopt appropriate strategies in translation practice.This thesis studies advertising translation from the perspective of functionalist theory and discusses advertising translation standard and strategies with the aim to practically help improve advertising translation from Chinese to English. Functionalist approach to translation is characterized by its target-orientedness. This theory emphasizes the functionality of the target text in the target culture.Under this theory, the original text is not the only source of material that translators can work on. Translators are encouraged to make full use of various sources of information and they are entitled to choose whatever translation strategies he thinks appropriate to achieve the expected functions of the translation. Functionalist approach to translation has opened up a new perspective to translation studies. The major contribution of functionalist approach to translation is that it enriches the theory of translation criterion through the introduction of the function and/or the purpose of the target text as the decisive criterion of all translation. (Schaffner,1998:1). And another contribution of the theory is that it provides a theoretical basis for some unconventional translation strategies such as adaptation and rewriting. Due to the unique style and purposes of advertisement, the writer of the thesis suggests that in advertising translation, translators should consider target readers'psychological world, cognitive context, culture and aesthetics. Then, by authentic examples, the writer attempts to explore some successful translation techniques applicable to advertising translation in light of functionalist approach.