On The Translation Of Chinese Advertisements In A Communication Perspective

With the rapid development of world economy and China's entry into WTO, more and more Chinese enterprises are promoting their products on the international markets. To make their products more competitive, Chinese enterprisers must use proper advertisements to make their products better known and more acceptable to foreign customers. Translating Chinese advertisements into English has therefore become an important part in the promotion program of Chinese enterprises aiming to enter the international market. The study of advertisement translation is of great realistic significance and practical value.As advertisement is a practical genre which has its own peculiarities, the translation of advertisements is regarded not as a process of linguistic transformation but as a special form of mass communication. This paper studies advertisement translation and the common problems existing in it from the perspective of communication theory, attempting to find effective ways to solve the problems.Firstly, the author makes a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the essential elements involved in the process of the advertisement translation including audience, translator, author as well as the theory of "uses and gratifications" and "the communicator as gatekeeper". It is put forward in this thesis that advertisement differs from other genre in that it emphasizes the communicative effect on the intended audience. The communicative effect cannot be realized without the audience's reception. Thus, the translator of the advertisement should take the target reader's acceptability into serious consideration, and an audience-centered translation orientation should be adopted. The author in the advertisement translation is anonymous while the translator should be emphasized. If literal translation may result in unintelligible or unacceptable translated works, the translator of advertisement is endowed with the rights to make proper modification to the original version on the condition the spirit ofthe original should be fully conveyed. Message-----the translated versionmust be intelligible, and they should be transmitted to the foreign audience in a way that they can decode. The audience's response also plays an important part in the success of advertisement translation. The translator of the advertisement, therefore, must be sensitive to anticipatory feedback, adjusting the communication load of a translation primarily by means of anticipating in advance the likely reaction of the intended audience. Based on the above analysis, the paper puts forwardthe principle of translation of Chinese advertisement-----target audienceorientation, and explores it from two aspects, namely, target audience's language orientation and target audience's culture orientation. Furthermore, the thesis helps to put forward some effective strategies for the translation of Chinese advertisement.