On Translating Advertisements Between Chinese And English: A Functionalist Approach

Translating Advertisement between Chinese and English: A Functionalist ApproachThe present study attempts to offer a contribution to the area of the translation of advertisements between English and Chinese. Through exploiting advertising knowledge and relevant translation theories, we endeavor to derive a tentative model applied to the analysis of a corpus of authentic materials (mainly English and Chinese advertisement pairs) to find out how specific the translations are done in the context of international advertising. Before applying the model to the corpus, it is tested as a tool of analysis on two advertisements, one in each language, to see how it contributes to producing the intended message. The findings of the sample test are then applied to the corpus to find out what problems the translator may encounter in attempting to achieve the skopos (intended goal) in the target market and to what extent differences in culture are involved in this process of text production. The aim of this thesis is not only to investigate advertisement translation on the grounds of textual perception and cultural specifics, but also to examine in detail the power of advertisement translation in business environment.Based on description and analysis of advertising translations, we discussed on the elicited findings, and tried to bridge the gap between abundant practice and unsatisfactory translation pedagogy and translation quality assessment. We conclude that translating advertisements is not just a SL-TL linguistic operation, but often a specialized adaptation process according to factors of the target culture. First of all, it differs from traditional translation practice in that it centers on the target audience. Secondly, the process of advertising translation must be regarded as a business function under influence of the economic environment. And finally, the advertising translator actually made his decisions on optimal strategies and tactics within the constraints of particular cultural and ideological context.