A Study Of Advertisement Translation--Metaphor Translation From The Perspective Of Cognition

This dissertation aims at finding out the principle and strategies of metaphor rendering in advertisement from the perspective of cognition. Advertisements have become a key issue in language study with advertisements' prompt development, and the frequent international communication. The rendering between English advertisements and Chinese advertisements stands as the focus in this paper, because English advertisements prevail in our daily life as English is a main international commercial language. The author makes a detailed exploration on the vivid language features of advertisement and concludes that metaphor is the soul of advertisement, and advertisement translation is metaphor translation. Then the author extends a thorough analysis of metaphor, and metaphor translation based on the theory of cognition, in particular, relevance theory and the principle of optimal relevance. As a result, a cognitive framework for metaphor rendering between English and Chinese is provided, and the strategies of metaphor rendering are proposed. These are: metaphors to metaphors, metaphors to similes, and metaphors to nonmetaphors. These strategies are further developed into seven individual methods: reproducing the same image in the target language, replacing the image in the source language by a standard target language image, same metaphor combined with sense, conversion of metaphor to simile retaining the image, simile plus sense, conversion of metaphor to sense, and deletion. Based on these methods, the resultant omissions, additions, and alterations may indeed be justified in metaphor translation. This paper is intended to enrich the study of translation, in particular, the study of metaphor translation, through the angle of advertisements which embody a far vivid feature of metaphor and plays an important role both in our economy and our life.