Analysis Of Pragmatic Failure In Advertising Translation

Advertising is something that we are all exposed to and it is likely to affect most of us in different spheres of our life. Owing to its special functions, advertising language has its unique characteristics. In turn, advertising language has become the research target for many linguists.So far a lot of scholars have studied advertising language from the perspectives of stylistics and pragmatics. But few books and articles are published to analyze the English translations of Chinese advertisements. From the angle of pragmatics and cross-cultural communication, this thesis focuses on the analysis of hybrid language, namely the English translations of Chinese advertisements, with the aim of revealing the pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure in translations. With the help of Jenny Thomas's theory of pragmatic failure, the thesis will apply the research method of qualitative analysis. Based on prototype theory and the theory of language transfer, the present study is undertaken by exploring the reasons for cross-cultural pragmatic failure, revealing that the sources of failure are traced back to the transferences of pramalinguistic and sociopragmatic rules of mother tongue to the target language. The analysis should help to illustrate how the theoretical insights of pragmatics could inform the practice advertisements translation.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one is devoted to Thomas'theory of pragmatic failure and his classification of pragmatic failure; Chapter Two gives a deep discussion of the reasons leading to pragmatic failure and the focus is on the cognitive approach and transfer theory; the analysis of English translations of Chinese advertisement will proceed in Chapter three, four and five, with a view of shedding some light on the sources of cross-cultural pragmatic failure, that is transference of pragmalinguistic and sociopramatic rules of mother tongue to the target language and translation equivalence.It goes without saying that such a research is of practical significance to the people engaged both in business and linguistic circles. Hopefully, this thesis will do some help to the advertising business in China, finally improving the quality of English translations of Chinese advertisements.