The Study Of Advertisement Translation From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

This thesis is a study on Chinese-English and English-Chinese translation of advertisement (hereafter abbreviated as ad) in the light of relevance theory (abbreviated as RT).Ads and their translation become an important part of modern life with the development of international trade and global economy. Since ads are unique both in form and function, the traditional translation theories and equivalence-based linguistic approach which seek for faithfulness or equivalence to the source text usually fail to achieve positive social effects, thus they are quite deficient in ad translation. The functionalist approach assigns the function of the target text a higher status but its weakness lies in that it can not explain clearly how the translator's creative process works during ad translation.RT treats human communication as an ostensive-inferential process, and it deems that every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance. Moreover, RT holds that translation is a special type of verbal communication involving inference and relevance, and what is translated is either informative or communicative intention. The translation criteria are to transfer the optimal relevance, that is, to achieve adequate pragmatic effects with minimal efforts in language processing.The author considers that RT can guide ad translation availably and fulfill the intention of advertisers in the target text. In this thesis, several aspects in which RT enlightens ad translation are discussed as follows.Firstly, In RT approach, the aim of ad translation is to fulfill the communicative purpose and yield adequate contextual effects in the target environment, which is to persuade the audience to purchase the advertised products or services, or lure them to follow the advice in the ad.Secondly, RT attaches importance to the relevance of the text and its context. In the light of RT, to discover the relevance between the source text and its context is the precondition of correct ad translation, and thepragmatic effect of translated ad in the target context is the basic evaluation of ad translation. Since language and culture are two main factors concerning with ad context, the acquirement of the knowledge of cultural and linguistic differences between Chinese and English advertising is the first step in ad translation.Thirdly, the translator plays a significant role in ad translation since he is responsible for double inferences in the translation process. One is to find out the intention of the original advertiser of the source text by relevance; the other is to transfer it into the target language by inferring the contextual environment of the audience. Considering the target environment, the translator uses inference in the translating process and chooses appropriate translation methods instead of translating the source text "faithfully" or "equivalently". With the help of some authentic examples, the writer attempts to explore some successful translation strategies satisfying ad translation, such as innovative abridgement, ingenious expansion and creative adaptation. These translation techniques mean to alter the original form deliberately or even change the information and contents of the source text if necessary, so that the translated ads are optimally relevant to the target audience at minimal processing effort, and cater for the target audiece. They used to be considered against the existing criteria of translation but can be explained and supported by RT, and help work out satisfactory outcome in practice as well as to crack many hard nuts in ad translation.