On Advertisement Translation From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

With the entry into the WTO and the successful bid for the World Expo, Chinaenjoys more and more prestige and increasing cooperation with other countries.There has been a dramatic rise in the number of Chinese enterprises and productswhich flow into the international market while at the same time more foreign goodsflood into our domestic market, leading to the invaluable translation of commercialadvertisement in the heated war of competition. However, according to the surveymade by the Translators’ Association of China, China lacks talented translators. Forone thing, lots of qualified translators are needed, for another, graduates whomajored in translation and English can’t meet the need in the translation market.Currently, the research on advertisement translation is mainly about strategies,techniques and skills, and translation problems and phenomenal analysis, buttheoretical research is weak and its research is loose and unsystematic. This presentresearch chooses to explore the process of advertisement translation from theperspective of Adaptation Theory, and tends to build a practical framework ofadvertisement translation, for the purpose of providing instruction and reference forfostering advertisement translators.Jef Verschueren proposes a holistic perspective to Adaptation Theory tointerpret language use in a social, cognitive and cultural way, assuming thatlanguage use is a continuous making of linguistic choices consciously andunconsciously to adapt to communicative aim. In advertisement translation,Adaptation Theory stresses the dynamics of contexts and subjectivity of a translatoras well as the corresponding constraints.First, this paper analyzes the linguistic features of English and Chineseadvertising languages from the perspective of Adaptation Theory. Advertisinglanguage is a market-oriented and culture-oriented communicative tool, and with an advertising goal, it should adapt to consumers’ mental world, to messagetransmission, and to different cultures at every level of vocabulary, sentence, sound,discourse and rhetorical devices. Therefore, the translator has to choose linguisticobjects to adapt to target consumers and then makes the final choice according todifferent contexts after analyzing the linguistic features.Second, in light of Adaptation Theory, in the advertisement translation process,the translator is making continuous choice and adaptation in the constraints of socialculture, advertising purpose, translator self and consumers: Considering the goal ofadvertisers and recipients, the advertisement producer works out the original text bymaking the choice in language. Having analyzed the function and context of theoriginal text, the translator works out the original text by making a choice indecoding process. The text in the target language comes into being after a secondchoice by analyzing the context and recipients of the target language. Then therecipients will make a choice of the ultimate advertising text. From the process, wecan see the original author, translator and recipients are influenced by the respectivecontext. The whole process is a dynamic choice.Finally, this research uses advertising cases from Singapore World ResortSentosa to analyze how the translator makes linguistic choices and what kind oftranslating strategies can be used.Besides, a translator’s competence has been mentioned: They are bilingualproficiency (language application, sociological knowledge, context, grammar andvocabulary), translation knowledge (translation career, translation theory,knowledge of translation market including clients and recipients), specificknowledge of the world (bi-cultural knowledge and advertisement knowledge) andprocess knowledge (the material applied in translation and IT)In sum, this research tends to construct an advertisement translation frameworkfrom the perspective of Adaptation Theory, tentatively contributing to the fosteringof advertisement translators. Admittedly, advertisement translation has attracted growing attention, but the actual translation theory and practice, still as yetunder-explored, is an area which calls for more research.