A Study On Translation Of Advertisement From Perspective Of Relevance

In the modern society, as a tool for promoting sales, advertising has attached a very great influence on people's life and it has played a more and more important role in the economic life. Thus, increasing significance has been exerted to advertisement. Due to the development of the world economy, the competition for market becomes keener and keener, so that advertisements and their translation are getting even more important. This thesis is a study on Chinese-English and English-Chinese translation of advertisements under the guidance of the relevance theory.Advertisements are unique in many aspects; such as in form and function, and so on. Thus the traditional translation theories sometimes could not achieve the intentional effects. Thus the traditional theories become more and more deficient in advertising translation. In this thesis the author tries to adopt the relevance theory to guide the advertising translation.Relevance theory treats communication as an ostensive-inferential process, and it believes that every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance. Moreover, it holds that translation is a special type of verbal communication involving inference and relevance, and what is translated is either informative or communicative intention. For the speaker,he/she only makes manifest his/her informative intention. But from the hearer's perspective, it is an inferential process, in the cognitive environment shared with the speaker, the hearer seeks optimal relevance between the utterances and contextual assumptions that he has made, then obtains the contextual effects and infers the intention of the speaker to achieve a successful communication. Thus, the criteria of the advertising translation are to transfer the optimal relevance, that is, to achieve adequate pragmatic effects with minimal efforts in language processing.This thesis is presented in five chapters.Chapter One is a general introduction, including two parts: one part is the introduction to the basic knowledge of advertising of advertising and the other is the introduction to the thesis. Chapter Two is a literature review of advertising translation and relevance theory. Chapter Three is a survey of relevance theory. In this chapter, the author outlines basic concepts and presumptions of relevance theory and relates how relevance theory enlightens advertising translation. Chapter Four is the main part of this thesis. Several strategies of advertising translation are put forward under the guidance of relevance theory. These strategies include: expansion, abridgement, recreation, literal translation and so on. Chapter Five is the conclusion of this thesis. The author summarizes the whole thesis, and points out some limitations and suggestions for further study.