Translation Of Commercial Advertising From The Perspective Of Principle Of Equivalence And Its Cultural Relevancy

For the time being, advertising is indispensable to the lives of people in developing and developed countries alike. As the economy develops, advertisements have penetrated every comer of our life and are essential to us all. Without exception, people read advertisements before going shopping or looking for jobs. It is against this social background that advertising has developed so much in the world. With China's entry into the WTO, more and more foreign commodities are swarming into the Chinese market, so are the Chinese commodities into international markets. Advertising, a vital marketing tool, serves the functions of informing consumers of the product/service concerned and persuading them into purchases. It is, therefore, not only necessary but very urgent to make a laborious study of the translation of advertising. By now, importance has been realized of this study and much research work has been done on this topic. But the work is far from adequate for its needs. Bearing the purposes of breaking through the limitations of previous studies and helping those who labor at translating advertising as their vocation, this thesis attempts to make a systematic study of translating Chinese advertisements into English and vice versa under the guidance of the theory of translation equivalence.This paper begins with the basic knowledge of advertising, including its definition, basic functions, classification, purposes and principal linguistic features, which serves as a preparation for the involvement of the translation principle and strategies. Then an introduction to a variety of approaches to translation equivalence is presented. It is in this part that the author compares the approaches and draws a conclusion that Nida's theory of equivalence is right for advertising translation. Subsequently, it expounds the cultural characteristics of advertising language and cultural factors in advertising translation, which have resulted in great trouble in cross-cultural communication. Based on Nida's theory, the final chapter is devoted to the translation of advertisements by means of various techniques and strategies and from the lexical and rhetorical perspectives. Also, some creative work has been done. For cultural factors, the paper treats them at both lexical and textual levels. Practical solutions are put forward to tackling the problems existing in the translation of cultural elements.