The Study On English Advertising And Its Translation From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

In the commercial society, advertising is everywhere. Advertising has been permeated into every corner of people's daily life. With the rapid development of Chinese economy and China's entrance into WTO, more and more Chinese enterprises and products are exposed to international market. Meanwhile, with the globalization of the economy, many products from different countries are poured into China. Advertising, as a weapon of promoting sales, plays an increasingly important role. So does the advertising translation. As a special applied text type, the purpose of advertising is to persuade the audience to take action to buy the products or services advertised. The objective of advertising translation is also like this. Therefore, a new cognitive pragmatics theory is applied to analyze the advertising translation.This paper tries to analyze English advertising and its translation from the perspective of relevance theory. The paper reviews Sperber & Wilson's Relevance Theory in detail by illustrating its basic points, including the inferential nature of communication, context and optimal relevance and its application in analysis of English advertisement and its translation. Relevance Theory holds that communication is an ostensive-inferential process. To the speakers, communication is an ostensive process while to the audience it is an inferential process. The audience want to infer the speaker's communicative intention, they should find the optimal relevance between the utterance and its context under the mutual cognitive environment. Translation, as an inter-language communication, also includes ostensive-inferential process. The translator is mainly to find the optimal relevance between the original text and the context in target text and then make the target readers understand the communicator's communicative intention. Advertising, as a special applied language, emphasizes its effects: the target audience's acceptance, understanding of the advertising and also response to it. Therefore, during the process of advertising translation, the translator should find the optimal relevance from the advertiser's ostensive communicative act and then convey the information to the audience in the mutual cognitive environment of translator and the audience, but not adhere to the words and sentences of the original advertising writing. The object of advertising translation is to realize the communicator's intention and persuade the target audience to accept the products or services. Many examples are applied to illustrate the translation strategies in advertising translations: literal translation, free translation, structure-borrowing translation, creative translation, supplementary translation, condensed translation and zero-translation. It proves that advertising translation can be guided by Relevance Theory.