On The Rhetoric Of Advertising English And Its Application To The Translation Of Chinese Advertisements

Advertisements are getting their way into our daily life: they may smile to us from the television screen, shout to us from the radio loudspeakers, wave invitingly to us from every page of the newspaper and magazine, pluck at our sleeves on the buses and escalators, signal to us from roadside billboards and flash to us on the Internet. Advertisements, the content of which is appeal and the form of which is language, in any of mass media communication frequently make use of the direct approach of rhetorical devices to objectify appeals and enhance its persuasive power.However, when a large amount of marvelous advertisements flood into another nation, their renditions could not always be as wonderful as the original and, therefore, might fail to produce similar effects on the target audience. Puzzled and stimulated by this problem, the author of this thesis has made an intensive study of the characteristics and the effectiveness of rhetorical figures incorporated in advertisements, and attempted to apply the findings to the advertisements translation.The thesis consists of four chapters.Chapter One serves as an introduction to the general features of advertising. As is known to all, the fundamental role of advertising is persuasion that differentiates advertising from other genres of writing. Therefore, the peculiarities of advertising in language and structure are elaborated in this chapter. Furthermore, problems arising from cross-cultural advertising are given an exposure.Chapter Two is devoted to the study of rhetoric in general. In particular, the author points out that emphasis is laid on the study of Aesthetic Rhetoric rather than Communicative Rhetoric in advertising, for the latter has been widely discussed in traditional studies. Aesthetic Rhetoric, which attaches great importance to figures of speech in virtue of imagination and association, has stilla lot to explore.In Chapter Three, the main body of this thesis, the author explores the characteristics of the rhetorical devices in advertising at the phonetic, lexical and syntactical levels and strives to find out how the persuasive effect is achieved. Through a detailed analysis of a large number of advertisements, the author finds out that rhetorical figures can make advertising neat in form, rhythmic in rhyme and dramatic in effect, arousing psychological response in terms of meaning, form and sound. In this way, advertising successfully achieves its best persuasive effect and impresses the target audience.In Chapter Four, based on Nida's theory of "functional equivalence" and the study of the nature of advertising, the author tentatively proposes the principle of "similarity in function, correspondence in effect" for Chinese-English advertising translation and offers a discussion of the possibilities of the application of rhetorical devices to the translation of Chinese advertisements, for rhetorical devices, in accordance with what has been explored in Chapter Three, help to produce desired effect on the target audience of the translated advertisements.The above analysis leads the author to the conclusion that advertising English is on the whole a language variety of persuasion, for the attainment of which advertising copywriting adopts certain rhetorical devices. In accordance with the characteristics of advertising, the translator should properly retain, adapt or even convert rhetorical devices in advertising translation so as to maintain the maximum flavor of the original ads and effectively communicate the original brand values and, consequently, can yield the best result in reproducing effective, distinctive and persuasive advertising.Pan Li (Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics) Directed by Professor Zuo Biao...