An Analysis Of The Strategies In Chinese Translation Of English Advertisements From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Advertising, as a means of promoting sales, has become an integral part of our daily life and has been playing a more and more important role in economic communication. With the rapid development of international business and multinational companies, there is a growing need for efficient international advertising communication and translation. Indeed, as a branch of translation study, advertising translation has its own laws and demands a systematic study. However, it is still an under-explored field which has not yet been adequately studied in the discipline of translation. Thus, this thesis approaches advertising translation from the perspective of Relevance Theory and discusses advertising translation criteria and strategies with the aim of practically helping improve advertising translation from English to Chinese.This paper is composed of four parts. The author starts from a survey of advertisements and provides a reliable basis for the research of advertising translating in the following part. After analyzing two traditional principles, the paper reviews Sperber&Wilson's Relevance Theory by illustrating its basic points, including the inferential nature of communication, optimal relevance and context and therefore proposes Relevance Theory should be an appropriate guiding theory of advertising translation. Subsequently, the theory is justified for the analysis of advertising translation from the perspective of the inference, contextual effects and optimal relevance of advertisements. In the third chapter, clear distinction is made between English and Chinese advertisements in terms of three respects before the author probes into the detailed study of the translation approaches. Consequently, the conclusion is further proved that traditional equivalence-based linguistic approaches to advertisement translation fail to achieve satisfactory effect. Then the paper advances to classify various kinds of translation strategies into seven groups and through examples demonstrates that they could be chosen to achieve pragmatic...