On Domestication-A Primary Strategy In Advertisement Translation

Ad is not only a kind of commercial activity but also a cultural one. In this way, ad translation involves the transfer between two languages and cultures. And it is domestication and foreignization that are used to deal with cultural and linguistic differences. With the deepening of cultural communication, more and more scholars insist on foreignization, and there even appears a tendency of foreignization in literary translation circle. As far as practical translation especially ad translation is concerned, the author holds that domestication is used as the primary strategy and foreignization as the secondary strategy. This thesis aims at exploring the primary strategy-domestication in ad translation.German functionalist theory appeared in the 70s and it consists of three major parts, that is, Reiss's Text Typology, Vermeer and Nord's Skopotheorie and Mantarri's Theory of Translation Action. Among them, Reiss's Text Typology and Skopotheorie play an important role in directly guiding the choice of translation strategies. On the one hand, according to Reiss's Text Typology, ad belongs to vocative text, and it should adopts domestication in ad translation, for one of the two main factors of such type of text is that it must be written in a language that is immediately comprehensible to the readership. On the other hand, according to Skopotheorie, the choice of translation strategies mainly rests on the translation purpose. As far as ad translation is concerned, its purpose is to promote products. In other words, its aim is not to seek alienation, but to seek the commonness to reduce the obstacles of communications as much as possible so as to realize the intended function and aim. Therefore, the fluent version is comparatively acceptable to the target readers. In addition, considering its target readers, domestication should be adopted as a primary strategy in ad. This is because most of the ad versions are directed at the common target readers, who know little about the source culture and language. What's more, they have formed their own habit of thinking and reading in their own language. Therefore, familiar expressions are more acceptable to common target readers.Of course, adopting domestication as the primary strategy in ad translation doesn't exclude foreignization. Considering its special readership-young readers, foreignization should be used as a secondary strategy, since sometimes foreignization can satisfy their curiosity for exotic flavor, thus leading them to take actions.To sum up, considering the text type of ad, the purpose of ad translation as well as its target readers, domestication should be adopted as the primary strategy and foreignization as the secondary strategy in ad translation.In ad translation practice, domestication is done at various levels, including lexical level, syntactic level, discourse level and rhetorical level. Different levels of domestication help the readers to surmount the cultural and linguistic obstacles, hence achieving the expected aim. And it is those levels of domestication that further prove the workability and necessity of domestication in ad translation. While in ad translation, the specific ways of domestication in ad translation rest on semantic transliteration, paraphrasing, rearrangement, addition, abridgement, four-character translation, loan translation and adaptation.