An Aesthetic Approach To The Chinese Translation Of Advertising English

Advertising is a concentrated and comprehensive art with high commercial values. As a kind of applied language, advertising English has already separated from general English and developed into a non-standardized specific language because of its special application. It quite differs from general English in its diction. For a long time, studies have been made on this type of writing through different approaches, which can be summarized into the following six types: (1) studies on the stylistic characteristics and functions of advertising English and its translation; (2) comparative studies on language between English advertisements and Chinese ones; (3) studies on the strategies for the translation of advertising English; (4) comments on the translation of advertising English; (5) studies on the principles or criteria for advertising English translation; (6) studies on the application of translation theories to the translation of advertising English.Obviously, most of the previous researches laid stress on practicality but failed to study the translation of advertising English through an aesthetic approach. Historically, aesthetic research has been confined to literary translation, whereas this kind of study on thetranslation of advertising English has been much neglected and findings in this field are limited, and have not developed comprehensively, scientifically and systematically. The purpose of advertising copies is to introduce the beautiful qualities of products or services and beautiful images of enterprises to the customers and thus urge them to pursue the products or services. And it requires that the advertising copy itself should be an aesthetic work that is attractive. Therefore, there exist certain aesthetic values in advertising English. In the practice of translation, a translator should make every effort to reproduce the beauty in the original English advertisements. In this sense, the translation of advertising English is a kind of art. With the guidance of Jauss and Iser's Reception Aesthetics and Nida's Functional Equivalence, this thesis deals with the translation of advertising English through an aesthetic approach.The whole thesis is organized into four chapters. Chapter One gives a brief introduction to advertising and advertising English, particularly the definition, kinds, functions and principle of advertising as well as linguistic features and cultural properties of advertising English. Chapter Two focuses on the concept of translation, Reception Aesthetics and Nida's Functional Equivalence, and the enlightenment of these two theories on advertising translation, as well as the essenceof this type of translation. Chapter Three undertakes a detailed aesthetic analysis of the translation of advertising English, including the explanations of the aesthetic subjects, objects and activities. And much space is given to explain the different aesthetic tendencies in the two aesthetic objects. Chapter Four elaborates with sufficient examples the aesthetic representation of advertising English in Chinese from the perspectives of both language and content. And untranslatability in the aesthetic representation is also discussed in this chapter. Finally the thesis ends with a conclusion which aims at highlighting what has been discussed in this thesis.