A Study Of Puns In Advertiding English: Application And Translation

Advertising English is characterized by its originality, flexibility of language usage and the diversity of the forms. Apart from the distinguishing features at lexical and syntactic levels, rhetorical vehicles, as decorative devices of language, are frequently employed in advertising English. Punning, a concise way to express humor and wit, is particularly favored by advertisers to enhance the appeal of language. With sufficient exemplification, this thesis provides a detailed discussion of functions and classification of puns in advertising English.Puns, closely related to the sound and form of a certain language, have long been considered "untranslatable" due to the linguistic and cultural divergences between two different languages. However, the present author holds that there is translatability of puns to a certain extent. Although the punny sense may be lost in translation, translators can make various compensation and adjustment to achieve a similar effect since "there can be no absolute correspondence between two languages."To provide a theoretical foundation for translation of puns in advertising English, this thesis refers to Eugene Nida's functional equivalence theory. Nida's functional equivalence theory is of great value, which puts emphasis on "readers' response" because advertising English, as a vocative text, aims to produce an expected response from readers and puns are used to serve this purpose. Moreover, this paper proposes that "correspondence in meaning and similarity in function" should be the basic criteria for translation of puns in advertising English.To suit the particular features of advertising texts to be translated and achieve "correspondence in meaning and similarity in function", guided by Nida's functional equivalence theory and the theories of translating puns by Peter Newmark and Delabastita, the present author makes a few modifications to the strategies to render puns proposed by Professor Xu Zhongbing. As a result of such synthesis, four specific strategies are applied to translating puns in advertising English with a detailed analysis of abundant examples: from pun to pun, preserving both meanings, preserving one layer of meaning and compensation.