Pun Translation In English Advertisement

Being a driving force in our economy, advertising has become an indispensable element in the promotion of economic prosperity. Advertisement is a branch of arts which composed of language, pictures, music, and so on, among which the language is the most important carrier of message, conveying to us not only the information of the commodity but also ideas, values and other cultural message. Advertising is a means of cultural communication. The process of communicating advertising is also the process of popularizing culture, and a process of spreading, enforcing the social values and ideas upon the minds of the audience. Advertisements, giving the charm of language full play, use the simplest language to express the most complex meanings. Many kinds of rhetorical devices are used in advertisements among which pun is one of the most important figures of speech in English advertisement. However, previous attempts at pun translation were almost semantic approaches, much concerned with the mere transplantation of words and the recovery of grammatical structures, and lacking proper theoretic guidance.Pun translation in English advertisement is a cross-lingual, cross-cultural communication interaction. Since pun in advertising language is for special purpose, the translated version should firstly catch the target audience's attention, which determines that pun translation should have its own principles, criteria and approaches. As a branch of translation study, pun translation in English advertisement has its own laws and demands a systematic study.Functional equivalence theory initiated by Nida has taken advantage of the theory of aesthetics of reception, which emphasizes the subjective initiative and creativity of the receptors, and it also stresses their demands and aesthetic consciousness toward the adjustment mechanism of the works of art. It has sublated the"text-centered"proposition, initially focused on readers'responses, which is rather beneficial to the improvement on pun translation in English advertisement. The writer adopts functional equivalence theory as the guiding theory on the pun translation in English advertisements. And four effective strategies are to be explored to improve the translation of puns.