Linguistic Features Of Advertising And Its Translation--In Light Of The Functionalist Approach

This thesis is a study on Chinese English translation of advertisements in light of functionalist approach put forward in 1970s by some German scholars including Katharina Reiss, Hans J. Vermeer, Justa Holz Manttari, and Christiane Nord. An elaborate discussion is made about the communicative purposes of advertising. As a special case of pragmatic texts, advertising manifests clear persuasive function with characteristic language. Traditional equivalence-based linguistic approaches neglect the communicative functions of this text type and always seek to achieve formal equivalence between the source and target texts. Unfortunately, most of the time, the great efforts fail to achieve positive social effect. Through analysis of the intrinsic mechanism of the Chinese and English languages/cultures, considerable discrepancies in language use are found especially in the field of advertising. These findings crash the foundation of equivalence-based translation theories that there exists a correspondence between the two languages in question.The specific situation of advertising translation requires that translators try their best to fulfill the communicative functions of ads. In order to do so, forms of the original texts could be changed to adapt to the target settings. Functionalist theory justifies this translation practice, declaring the focus of the translational act should "not be the original and its functions, as equivalence-based translation theory would have it, but the function or set of functions the target text is to achieve in the target culture"(Nord, 1992). Functionalist scholars regard translational act as "a complex action designed to achieve a particular purpose"(Cited in Nord, 1997) and hold that "translation is the production of a functional target text maintaining a relationship with a given source text that is specified according to the intended or demanded function of the target text (translation Skopos)"(Nord, 1991). In this model, the source text serves as only "an offer of information" from which a translator selects the items he or she finds interesting and important to reach the intended goal (Cited in Nord, 1997).Thus the functionalist approach provides theoretical basis for certain translationpractice used to be considered against the existing criteria of translation but with satisfactory outcome, and provokes reappraisal of translation methods such as abridgement and adaptation. By authentic examples, the writer attempts to explore some successful translation techniques applicable to advertising translation in light of this revolutionary theory.