Intertextuality And Advertising Translation

The term "intertextuality" was first put forward by the French literary theorist Julia Christeva. She thinks that any text results from the absorption and transformation of other texts, and she calls this textual characteristic intertextuality. In her opinion, any text is intertextual. Stressing the reference between different texts or within a given text, intertextuality claims that the understanding of a text presupposes the acquaintance of both references within this given text and references of this given text to other concerned texts. This method of understanding a text provides translators with a brand-new perspective for interpreting texts. Basil Hatim and Ian Mason soon realize the guiding significance of intertextuality in translation, hence introducing this theory to translation.Advertising translation attracts translators' utmost interest because of its economic impetus and also proves to be a most challenging task because of the uniqueness of advertising language. With the help of intertextuality theory, the author of this paper tries to probe into the most inner functional system of advertising language and uncovers the password of advertising translation.Guided by this idea, the author begins the discussion with an introduction of intertextuality theory. As a postmodernism term, intertextuality proclaims the death of the author and dissolves the originality of texts by advocating that any text is an open system based upon mutual reference. Inspired by the former research achievement on intertextuality, this paper presents a redefinition for a couple of terms in this theory, i.e. strong intertextuality and weak intertextuality, from the perspective of reference frequency and discusses their characteristics with reference to Hatim and Mason's intertextual space theory. Texts of strong intertextuality tend to be concise, beautiful and familiar to people because of their high reference frequency. Furthermore, any change made in theirintertextual relation will inevitably endow them with a new characteristic:novelty. These qualities of strong intertextuality are sufficient to meet therequirement of advertising language, for the attention value and thememory value of advertisements prescribe advertising language should beeasy to remember, that is, be concise, and should be easy to catchattention, that is, be beautiful and original. This well proves thecharacteristic of strong intertextuality of advertising language. This studyof characteristics of advertisements paves the way for the author toanalyze the correspondence and non-correspondence between Chineseadvertisements and English advertisements from intertextual angles.Subsequently, a clarification of the differences and the similaritiesbetween Chinese and English advertisements provides the author with afactual basis for putting forward his intertextual translation strategies.After summarizing a large number of examples of successful advertisingtranslation and taking full advantage of all his previous discoveries, theauthor finally proposes two advertising translation strategies from theintertextual perspective: retaining the intertextual space of the originaladvertisement in the target language, substituting the intertextual space ofthe original text in the target text, and illustrates their application inadvertising translation.At the end of the paper, the author briefly summarizes the main points of intertextuality theory and its enlightenment on advertising translation and points out its limitations in practical translation. Considering the discoveries made in the paper, the author is convinced that intertextuality can really broaden the horizon of advertising translators and provide a new way of thinking for and a new approach to successful advertising translation.