Analysis Of Translated Advertisements From A Functional Approach

With the rapid development of international business and multinational companies, there is a growing need for efficient international advertising communication and translation. However, advertising translation is still an underexplored field which has not yet been adequately studied in the discipline of translation. As a branch of translation study, advertising translation has its own laws and demands a systematic study. Traditional equivalence-based linguistic approaches to advertisement translation fail to achieve satisfactory effect mainly for two reasons. First, through analysis of the intrinsic mechanism of the Chinese and English languages and cultures, considerable discrepancies in language use are found especially in the field of advertising. Thus there hardly exists an absolute correspondence between the two languages. Second, equivalence-based approaches always seek to achieve formal equivalence between the source and target texts and neglect the communicative functions of advertisement translation.Functionalist approaches put forward in 1970s by some German scholars including Katharina Reiss, Hans J. Vermeer, Justa Holz Manttari, and Christiane Nord, shed light on advertisement translation. This theory emphasizes the functionality of the target text in the target culture. In order to fulfill the communicative functions of advertisements, forms of the original texts could be changed to adapt to the target settings. Functionalist theory justifies this translation practice, declaring 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. 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.Under functionalist theory, translators are encouraged to make full use of various sources of information and they are entitled to choose whatever translation strategies he thinks appropriate to achieve the expected functions of the translation. Functionalist approach to translation has opened up a new perspective to translation studies. It provides a theoretical basis for some unconventional translation strategies such as abrigement, adaptation and imitation.By authentic examples, the writer attempts to explore some successful translation techniques applicable to advertising translation in light of this revolutionary theory.