English Advertising Text: Functional Analysis And Translation

As a kind of mass media, advertising plays a very important role in modern society and permeates every aspect of social life. The advertising language has caused more and more attentions and the study of its translation also becomes quite important.As a kind of linguistic art, advertising has aroused attention to its language features and social functions. It is a sort of practical style which has high commercial values. The language in English advertisement belongs to "loaded language", which has a high "persuasive power". It aims at inspiring people's imagination, stimulating their emotion, and persuading them to purchase certain commodities. It transfers the latest information about commodity and service, and accelerates and promotes the sales of commodity, and consequently furthers the development of modem society.Despite of being the popularly-studied, advertising has not received the deserved attention from linguists as a text. The main purpose of this study is to give an adequate analysis of the language of written commercial advertising within the framework of functional grammar. In this article, the author bases her study upon the standpoint of Halliday's theory of functional grammar, relating the textual function, interpersonal function and ideational function, register theory with practical advertising discourse, i.e. commercial advertisements. The paper discusses detailed translation tactics and skills concerning how to represent the textual features of the English advertising in the Chinese translation so as to preserve persuasive power of advertising. To the translator, the first important thing of the translation process is to analyze the source text and grasp its linguistic features, especially its usage marks such as the relationship between the message giver and receiver (tenor), the channel (mode) and the scope and aim (field). The paper is divided into six chapters: Chapter One gives a review of the previous studies and existing literature on advertising language and its translation and introduces the focus, significance, structure and data used in the paper. Chapter Two is the theoretical part. It provides an introduction to advertising, text analysis and function grammar (including metafunctions and register theory) and analyzes the three variables of advertising register. Chapter Three, Four and Five respectively describe ideational, interpersonal, textual functions and discuss the salient features of English advertisements from the perspectives of these three metafunctions, make contrastive analysis of the English advertisement and its Chinese version and finally explore the implication of the advertising textual analysis for the English-Chinese translation. Chapter Six is the conclusion of this paper. In this chapter, the applicability of functional grammar to text analysis is restated and the implications of text analysis through functional grammar to English-Chinese advertising translation practice are further discussed.The argument of the paper is based on both the author's findings of theoretical research and her experience drawn from her attempt at advertising translation. The ultimate aim of the paper is to give some practical suggestions and directions on how the functional grammar can be used in English advertising analysis and on its Chinese translation practice. This is what makes this particular thesis different from others.