On The Strategies For Translating Advertisements

With the rapid development of international business and multinational corporations, there is a growing need for efficient international advertising communication and translation. The amount of advertising translation is already substantial, and keeps increasing. However, incommensurate with its importance in cross-cultural communication, advertising translation is still an under-explored field, and the traditional equivalence theories seem increasingly inadequate to meet the needs in this aspect. That is because advertisements are of a very practical type of writing with high commercial or social value, and all the advertising materials have one thing in common, that is, behind the superficial properties of an advertisement there always lies the essence of it: the author's intention to persuade target readers. If the translator rigidly adheres to the original form and content in advertising translation, the translation may not produce the persuasive effect and may lead to a total failure. Therefore, a more practical theory and more effective strategies in translating advertisements are called for.As a breakthrough with the traditional equivalence theories and an important complement to translation studies, the theory of pragmatic equivalence has opened up a new perspective to the study of advertising translation. Koller puts forward the notion of pragmatic equivalence and regards translation as a communicative activity to communicate the author's intention and meet the readers' need. The Chinese representative of pragmatic translation, He Ziran, gives a more detailed account of this theory. He argues that pragmatics includes pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatic. Pragmalinguistic refers to the study of pragmatic force or language use in the context formally encoded in the structure of a language, and sociopragmatic refers to the pragmatic studies which examine the conditions on language use that derive from the social and cultural situation. Pragmatic equivalence, thus, including pragmalinguistic equivalence and sociopragmatic equivalence, aims at translating the pragmatic force of the message (the author's intention) in full, taking enough account of the differences between the target and source language in pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics. Therefore, it is of great importance in guiding the translation of advertisements.The whole thesis is divided into six chapters. From the study of theories to the analysis of authentic examples, it explores some practical and effective strategies intranslating advertisements. At the same time, the thesis attempts to justify some unconventional translation methods such as abridgement and adaptation theoretically and practically, though they used to be considered against the existing criteria of translation equivalence. The conclusion part shows that advertising is successfully translated only if the author's intention is properly expressed in the target text. The theory of pragmatic equivalence has its explanatory force and can be regarded as an applicable guideline in doing advertisement translation, though with some disadvantages of oversimplification and lack of objectivity to a certain degree. The new findings of this thesis can be concluded as follows: advertising is typically a pragmatic style;translating advertising is translating the copywriter's pragmatic meaning (intention) of arousing interest among target readers, and persuading them to buy the advertised products, accept the services, etc.;we should keep pragmatic equivalence as the guideline on advertising translation.