Functional Approaches To Advertisement Translation As A Text

Along with the dramatical development of the world economy, advertisements have penetrated into every corner of our life. As is known to all, good advertisements can not only popularize the products and services, but also build up brand reputations and company images. As a result, entrepreneurs all over the world have increasingly become aware of the significance of advertisement writing and translation, and make them part of their marketing strategy.Although advertisements have already found its way into all walks of people's life today, few people have realized its nature as a form of text. Advertisement text is different from other types of texts. Informative function, appellative function and expressive function are its main functions. And it has a communicative feature in essence. Advertisement text translation not merely serves as a simple information transfer from the source language into the target language, but a transfer concerning the linguistic and cultural features of the target language in a further sense.Functional approaches are developed on the basis of functional equivalence but different from it. In terms of functions, as the source text is the information source in the translation process, the target text is also another new source of information in the target culture. Great importance should be attached to the target text and its receivers. It is of great necessity that the translators fully understand the function and purpose of the target text, take advantages of the target language, and take the intended receivers and the advertising forms of the target text into consideration as to make the target text fulfill its intended function.The current study proposes two functional approaches to advertisement text translation, one being text-analysis-based translation approach with Systemic-Functional Grammar, the other being skopos-analysis-based translation approach with Skopostheorie.The main purpose of the thesis is to conduct a tentative study on advertisement text translation within the framework of functional theories, and at the same time give some suggestions concerning how functional approaches can be used in advertisement text translation practice. We firstly get a glimpse of functional approaches and advertisement text, and then make a detailed analysis of advertisement text translation through two functional approaches, mainly based upon Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar, relating to the ideational function, interpersonal function, textual function, context of situation and context of culture, as well as Vermeer's Skopostheorie. Later a discussion about principles and strategies concerning advertisement text translation is given. The translator can adopt such principles as fidelity of ideational function, equivalence of interpersonal function and coherence of textual function. Directed by these principles, the translator can use the strategies of foreignization and domestication to deal with translation issues at the cultural level. At last a conclusion is drawn: the translator has to decide the most effective translation principles and strategies according with the translation skopos and the cultural particularities based on text analysis.