Creative Treason In Advertising Translation-From Functionalapproach

As a main type of pragmatic texts, advertisement and its translation is always a hot topic for both translators and advertisement workers. How to improve advertising translation has become very important, not only for the development of translation industry, but also for the development of the whole social economy. Having made a comprehensive review of the advertising translation between Chinese and English, the writer finds that though it has been developing rapidly, some problems still exist. Except for some translation mistakes and misunderstanding, the advertising translation mainly leads to two extremes. Some translators follow the traditional criteria strictly and mechanically to reach fidelity to the source language, but not the expected effect of the text; while others rewrite or recreate the source text blindly in order to realize their purposes of translation. Neither of these two extremes is advisable, of course. To solve this problem and improve advertising translation, the writer advocates the tactic of "creative treason", and tries to patch up the limitations of the two extremes. Only in this way can translations reach the greatest fidelity to the source text both formally and functionally.The term "creative treason" comes from Robert Escarpit, a famous French literary sociologist. It was first introduced in detail to China by Professor Xie Tianzhen in his Medio-Translatology. And after that, creative treason was used widely in the study of literary translation. Many scholars, such as Professor Xu Jun, Yuan Li, Sun Zhili and Dong Ming, have studied the creative treason in literary translation and put forward their own opinions about it. But with the diversification in translation studies, we found that creative treason also has a great power to illustrate the pragmatic translation, especially to advertising translation.The present thesis discusses the creative treason in the functionalist context and holds that creative treason is not only an objective phenomenon in translation, but also an effective "translation tactic" taken by translators. First, the writer demonstrates the objectivity and universality of creative treason in translation, and illustrates the nature and causes of it. Then he makes further understanding of creative treason and gives a survey of its current studies. Second, the writer presents the three representative functional approaches of translation studies, i.e., German School of Functionalism, Newmark's Text Function theory and Nida's theory of Functional Equivalence, and discusses fidelity and creative treason in the functional approach. Third, the thesis talks about the features, requirements, criteria and methods of advertising translation, and points out the guiding theory of advertising translation. Finally, the writer explains the creative treason in advertising translation with functional approach and points out that the tactic of "creative treason" is necessary, applicable and feasible in advertising translation, so it should be encouraged in the translation practice.As the guiding theory of advertising translation, the functionalist translation theory emphasizes the translation purposes and text functions, which allows great flexibility and creativity of translators in the translating process. Due to various differences between the two languages involved, translators should make some linguistic and cultural adjustments creatively when translate the advertisements. Only in this way can the translation purposes and text functions be achieved. Though it's treasonous to some extent, the translation is faithful on the whole, since the main purpose of advertising translation is to promote the sales of the advertised product, but not just to transfer the advertisement itself.The writer also points out that creative treason should be encouraged only when it's hard or impossible to transmit the original information directly, which means that creative treason also has some limits that should be noticed. Therefore, it should be used appropriately and flexibly in translation practice.