A Study On Advertising Translation Under The Guidance Of Nida's Functional Equivalence Theory

With the development of China's economy, great changes have taken place in China. Communication among countries is more and more frequent. We can see advertising everywhere; advertising has played an important role in daily life, because advertising can help promote sales and guide the consumption. Chinese advertising industry has seen an unprecedented rapid development, so advertising translation has played an increasingly important role in the economic life. Nevertheless, the substantial differences between English-Chinese language and culture make advertising translation become a difficult job.Because advertising language is well known for its originality, flexibility of language usages and the diversity of the forms, it is a dilemma for translators that the translation would be equivalent to the original text and its function at the same time. Advertising translation is not traditional translation any more; it should make original and target languages reach the equivalence from semantic, social and cultural aspects. Advertising should be translated according to the four kinds of functional characters of advertising-Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. The commercial purpose of promoting sales is achieved by stimulating the purchasing desire of consumers.Due to the differences of language and culture and the differences of target language receptors, employing compensatory techniques can better realize the functional equivalence of advertising translation, but we need pay attention to the several aspects: verbal aspect, audience aspect, culture aspect; in the culture aspect, we should focus on these problems: cultural equivalence, cultural clash, cultural vacuum, cultural substitute. At the same time, advertising translation should achieve the functional equivalence, namely to attract the readership's attention and persuade them to purchase the advertised product.In the fifth chapter, the author will discuss Chinese-English advertisement translation strategies. Difficulties in Chinese-English advertisement translation are mainly caused by linguistic and cultural factors. According to Nida's functional equivalence theory, advertisement translation shall be target language oriented and target culture oriented. Therefore, the author suggests some translation methods based on the linguistic and cultural factors in advertisement translation respectively.Generally speaking, the linguistic and cultural factors can not be separated in an advertisement, but coexist in advertisement translation. On the basis of the degree of linguistic and cultural differences between the source text and target text, as proposed by Nida, the author gives further analysis by applying adaptation strategies, of which three concrete types are considered: direct transfer, partial adaptation and total adaptation.Total adaptation is a quite controversial one with regard to its nature, whether it can be classified as translation or not. However, the author raises the concept of total adaptation just for the purpose of providing a strategy for effectively realizing the function of advertisements and constituting a systematic analysis on adaptation strategies.