A Study On Advertising Translation: A Memetic Perspective

Recent years have witnessed the prevalence and importance of the advertisements in the wake of the fast economic development with China's entry into WTO. Advertisement has evolved into a paramount part of our complex economic and cultural systems, both mirroring and changing a society in one way or another. On the other hand, the translating of advertisements is not only the act of converting one language into another, but also a powerful tool in sales promotion and cultural transmission. A successful advertisement translation could make a product more popular and evoke potential customers' purchasing desire while an awful one could destroy both the product and the image of advertising company, sometimes even that of a country.It can not be denied that scholars at home and abroad have touched upon this issue under the guidance of several traditional theories, such as equivalence theory, skopos theory, and reception theory, all of which have contributed a lot to this field. Nevertheless, the realm of advertisement translation can be further explored by adopting an interdisciplinary method. With this concern, the present thesis is offered as a preliminary study on advertising translation from the perspective of memetics, a newly emerged theory in sociobiology. The study of memes shows its magic and appeal to scholars who deal with different subjects ever since it was first proposed by Richard Dawkins in 1976. With great interest in memetics and advertising translation respectively, the author has found the interface of these two domains after meticulous reading of works and papers. Different from traditional theories, memetics could provide a relatively systematic reference for investigating the translator's behavior. By combining macroscopic theoretical analysis with microscopic translating illustrations, the research sets out to deal with advertising translation within the memetic framework, with an attempt to draw translators' awareness that memetic theory can direct their behavior in advertisement translation effectively.The overall movement of the thesis goes from theory to practice, process to product and mainly looks at three questions: whether there are any relations between advertising and meme; how advertising memes decode and encode themselves in the process of translation; what influence norm memes, value memes and strategy memes have exerted on the translator's behavior in the practice of advertising translation. The answers to above questions will be laid out in this study. Firstly, the author gives a general remark on advertisement, including its properties as well as linguistic features. Then, offered as a firm theoretical ground, memetics is introduced into the study of advertisement. In other words, a close relationship between memetics and advertising has been established. Based on meme lifecycle theory elaborated by Francis Heylighen and Henrik Bjarneskans, the thesis goes on to advance a tentative memetic model for advertising translation process through a case study of a slogan. Finally, enlightened by Chesterman's translation memetics, the author discusses the norms, principles and strategies of advertisement translation from three aspects, namely, the translation of brand names, slogans and body texts.In a word, from the research results, i.e. the tentative memetic model for advertising translation process; various fruitful memes like norm memes, value memes as well as strategy memes in translation memetics, the writer concludes that memetic theory is proved to be of prominent significance in the practice of advertising translation. Last but not least, the author hopes the discussion herewith in this thesis can, to some extent, shed light on advertisement translators in their prospective fieldwork.