On Advertisement Translation From Functionalist Perspective

In modern society, advertisement can be found everywhere. Advertising has become part of people's daily life. With China's entering the World Trade Organization and the deepening of reform and opening, numerous foreign products have emerged in China's market. In the meantime, domestic enterprises are eager to exploit the much bigger global markets. Increasingly fierce commercial competition highlights the role of advertising which is a prominent means of promotion. Therefore, advertisement translation plays a more and more important role in the exchange of both economy and culture.As a special type of practical writing, advertisement has in its own high commercial values. It aims to promote sales of products or services. Whichever advertisement that can fulfill the aim is called a successful one. It is also true in the case of any translated advertisement. To achieve such a goal, the traditional translation strategies such as faithfulness and equivalence can no longer work in the translation of advertisements. Instead, the target-language-oriented and target-culture-oriented strategies are proper. This thesis tries to resurvey from the functionalist perspective the translation of advertisement and its strategies and criteria.The German scholars Reiss, Vermeer and Nord contribute to the functional translation theory whose core is the Skopos theory. It lays much emphasis on the target text during the translation process which was not emphasized in the traditional translation theory. The functional translation theory introduces the realization of functions of target text and makes it the yardstick of evaluating an advertisement translation. Moreover, the functional translation theory paves the way for adopting adaptive translation strategies such as adaptation which is commonly used in translating advertisement.According to Skopos theory, the primary principle determining any translation process is the purpose (Skopos) of the overall translational action. The top-ranking rule for any translation is thus the"Skopos rule". Vermeer explains the Skopos rule in the following way: Each text is produced for a given purpose and should serve this purpose. Besides the Skopos rule, there are two other rules, namely coherence rule and fidelity rule, which are subordinate to the Skopos rule. According to the functional translation theory, Skopos rule runs through the whole translation process and determines the translation action. These are of great significance for translating advertisement.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one deals with a general introduction of the background, significance and the present study about advertisement translation and functional translation theory. The second chapter mainly deals with the historical overview of advertisement and advertisement translation studies. And then in the third chapter, the background, development and core concepts of functional translation theory are introduced. Chapter four lists abundant examples to illustrate advertisement translation from a functionalist approach. In the last part, chapter five draws the conclusion.