Explorations On Bilingual Advertisement Translation: An Adaptation-theoretic Perspective

Advertising is pervasive in our life, especially the cross-border part targeting foreign markets. This gives birth to advertisement translation, and naturally the research on advertisement translation also becomes the province of bilingual scholars and experts. Many have dwelled on this topic from various disciplines, such as semiotics, discourse analysis, aesthetics and cross-cultural communication studies.This thesis revisits advertisement translation from a pragmatic perspective of adaptation. Jef Verschueren's Adaptation Theory is a new-born but more encompassing theory. The author wants to reveal how, under this theoretical framework, different, yet interdependent constraints on the translation process play their roles in translation of advertisements.Advertisement translation falls within the realm of advertising. So after the cursory review of the research on advertisement translation and the introduction of Adaptation Theory, the author makes an overview about advertising and proposes that the commercial purpose is what advertisement translation intends for. Then a working definition of advertising translation in the adaptation-theoretic perspective is given.In the bulk of the analysis, the author holds that, Verschueren's point that adaptation-making is to satisfy the communicative goal(s), has made some "deviant" methods theoretically justified. Then according to Verschueren's division of context, the author explores how adaptation to contextual constraints, linguistic and extra-linguistic, takes place in advertisement translation. The present thesis ends up with an adaptation model of advertising translation, which is based on the exemplification.In conclusion, Verschueren's theory casts new insight over the research of advertisement translation. And this tentative study will be conducive to advertisement translators, advertisers as well as copywriters.