A Study On Strategies For Translating Chinese Advertisements Into English From A Skopostheorie Perspective

In modern society, the advertisement plays a crucial role in commercial propaganda. Since China joined WTO, more and more Chinese products have been exported to English-speaking countries. In order to win more foreign consumers, it has become an urgent and important task to translate Chinese advertisements into English.As an operative text, the ultimate purpose of an advertisement is to persuade the customers to buy products or services advertised. The advertisement has distinctive stylistic features and thus the advertisement translation has its own theoretical basis and evaluation criteria. The advertisement is of high commercial value and thus the quality of advertisement translation is often judged by the economic profits.In the 1970s, the Skopos theory put forward by the German scholar Vermeer provides a new perspective for advertisement translation study. The Skopos theory emphasizes the function of the target text and postulates that the intended purpose of the target text determines the choice of translation strategies. The primary function of the advertisement is appellative in that the advertisement translation aims at causing the target readers the same response as the source text readers. Therefore, the advertisement translation cannot follow the traditional faithful and equivalent translation principle but requires some adaptations due to linguistic and cultural differences.This paper aims at finding out the strategies applied to C-E advertisement translation. In the framework of the Skopos theory, many functionalists also propose the dichotomy of translation strategies according to different purposes of translation. According to the stylistic function of advertisements, the advertisement translation mainly adopts the domesticating translation, the communicative translation and the instrumental translation.In the C-E advertisement translation process, the translator may choose translation strategies such as literal translation, adaptation, abridgement, amplification, imitation, semantic transliteration and creative translation as long as the expected purpose of the translation can be achieved. When the Chinese language happens to correspond to the English language, the strategy of direct translation may be adopted. Direct translation is, in many cases, applied to translating advertisements for technical products. However, direct translation is not always effective in directing advertisement translation. In most cases, adjustments of the source text are required to conform to the linguistic or cultural norms and conventions of the target text. In accordance with the brevity of English language, the translator should adopt the strategy of abridgement by leaving out unnecessary information from the source text and retaining the messages valuable to the target readers. Opposite to the abridgement is the strategy of amplification, which refers to the technique of adding information to the original text in order to make the readers have a clear idea of the advertised products. By imitation, we mean copying English advertisements, poetry or proverbs familiar to the target readers in order to strengthen the advertising effect. Semantic transliteration is a translation strategy by choosing a proper expression similar in sound to the original name and at the same time indicating the favorable meaning. In this way, the target text conveys a favorable business atmosphere and is easy to remember. In order to arouse the active emotional experience of consumers, the strategy of empathy is used in the process of advertisement translation. This strategy highlights the status of consumers by adopting the personal pronouns of"you-attitude", which helps shorten the distance between the advertiser and the readers, and by avoiding taboos in the target culture, which caters to the psychological need of target readers. Advertisement translation is not simply a passive activity of reproducing faithfully the message of the source text but a dynamic activity of creative interpretation of all factors involved in international advertising. In some cases, translators even have to re-create an advertisement on the basis of the source text to achieve the objective of advertising.