E-C Advertising Slogan Translation Under The Guidance Of Nida's Functional Equivalence Theory

Advertising, a pragmatic style with obvious economic purpose and effect, has its unique artistic and linguistic features. The main purpose of advertising is to improve the notability and expand sales of products and services. Since the beginning of the 1990s, more and more foreign products have been flowing into China, and advertising has become a very important means and a necessary tool for conveying information about foreign commodities to Chinese people. With China's entry into WTO and its deepening and widening of the opening up to the outside world, foreign advertisements, especially English advertisements appear everywhere in China, which have already become an important source for Chinese enterprises and consumers to obtain commodity information.Due to the popularity of English advertising, the study of E-C advertising translation has taken on greater importance in the field of translation studies. This thesis aims at introducing Nida's functional equivalence theory to guide the translation of E-C advertising slogans. Moreover, it sums up some techniques and strategies of translating advertising slogans into Chinese.This thesis is composed of six chapters.Chapter one gives a brief introduction to English advertising, including its definition, function, classification and structure and illustrates the purpose and significance of the present study.Chapter two reviews the notions of Nida's functional equivalence, explains the relationship between dynamic equivalence and functional equivalence, and discusses the feasibility of applying Nida's functional equivalence to E-C advertising slogan translation.Chapter three explores the linguistic features of English advertising slogans from three aspects, namely, lexical level, syntactic level and rhetorical level. Chapter four analyzes the differences between Chinese and English advertisements from linguistic and cultural aspects, which complicate E-C advertising translation. In addition, it sums up three principles of effective E-C advertising slogan translation, i.e. faithful, attractive and acceptable. Chapter five discusses the application of Nida's functional equivalence to the practical E-C advertising slogan translation aiming to achieve equivalence in translation from both aspects of linguistics and culture. Three translation techniques and strategies are proposed on the basis of Nida's equivalence theory, namely, direct transfer, adaptation and avoidance of cultural taboos.Chapter six summarizes the whole thesis, objectively stating the possible contributions of the thesis and pointing out the limitations of the thesis with some potential suggestions for future research.