Cultural Differences Between Chinese And English Ad Translation From The Perspective Of Skopostheorie

Common assumptions are that an advertisement will be effective if the viewer or readerdecodes the advertisement successfully, if there is a meaningful transfer of "properties." Whendeveloping one single idea for the whole world, one global stimulus for different cultures, theassumption is that responses will be similar, too. This can only happen if sender and receivershare one culture. If there is no shared culture, the response may be different from that which isintended and expected. This does not result in effective advertising.A growing number of products and services are consumed by global target groups. When itcomes to addressing people of different national cultures, the advertisement has to be translatedand some translations appear to include subtle changes of meaning influenced by culturaldifferences. However, incommensurate with its importance of cultural influences, advertisingtranslation is still an under-explored field which has not yet been adequately studied in thediscipline of translation.This thesis approaches the advertising translation from the perspective of Skopostheorie,explores the cultural differences in the process which aims at highlighting the importance ofcultural influences in the advertisement translation and discusses the advertising translationstrategies with the hope to practically help improve advertisement translation. The main pointsare as follows:1. Culture is universally acknowledged to be closely connected with language, whichconstitutes an essential part of the former. The intimate relation between language and culturedetermines cultural features are always manifested in language and understanding of onerequires understanding of the other. Translation is regarded as one of the most complexphenomenon in the history of cosmos, and cultural constitutes which are discussed arecommonly regarded as the most difficult part to translate.2. The consideration of cultural factors is based on the existence of its differences that influencemarketing in different countries. One of the important categories of differences is nationaltraits and values. While, Chinese culture is a collectivist culture, western culture is mainly anindividualistic culture. The Chinese values and psychologies found in the process oftranslation are modernity, technology, authority, respect for the elderly, prosperity, blessingwords and happiness. In the western countries, the identity and personality is strongly emphasized and romantic expressions are much more advocated. Differences in historicalbackground and the background knowledge of cultural allusions, proverbs and idioms areexemplified. Due to the different attitudes towards the numbers and animals, ones which havefavorable meanings in Chinese culture are proved to mean nothing in the western culture oreven evoke negative associations.3. Vermeer's Skopsthoerie emphasizes the skopos of the target text in the target culture. Underthe theory, the original text is no longer the first the foremost criterion for the translator'sdecisions. The source text is just the source of material that translators work on. Inadvertising translation, the commercial skopos of promoting sales is taken priority over otherfactors. Thus the translators are left much freedom to take whatever strategies to best servethe advertisement function. Semantic transliteration, literal translation, free translation andadaptation can serve the skopos.