A Study On The English Translation Of Chinese Advertisements From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence Theory

With China's entering WTO, globalization has also affected the world of advertising. Companies do not limit their ambitions to the domestic market. They are dedicated to expanding international market as well. Advertisement translation, being a type of intercultural communication and as a result of international business communication, gradually attracts the translator's attention and appears as a field of study.The advertisement is a practical text style with a very material purpose of attracting consumers' interest and persuading them to take action after reading. A good advertisement, when translated, may not be successful to the target audience if the translator just adheres to the original form and content in translation without considering the advertisement's connotation in the source language and the culture factors of the advertisement receptors. The translated version may not produce the same persuasive effect and may lead to the failure of promoting sales in the target market. Therefore, the traditional equivalence theory turns out to be increasingly inadequate and a more practical theory and translation strategy are called for.Functional equivalence, raised by Eugene A. Nida, is defined as "in terms of the degree to which the receptors of the message in the receptor language respond to it in substantially the same manner as the receptors in the source language." Receptors' response is focused on. So from this point of view, functional equivalence could be viewed as the right principle of advertising translation. The author explains the equivalence in translating Chinese advertisements into English ones in detail from the aspects of language and culture by applying Nida's functional equivalence and presents two feasible advertising translation strategies: direct transfer including literal translation and transliteration and adaptive transfer.