A Study On Chinese-English Commercial Advertising Translation-From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

With the economic globalization, China has gained trade boom. In recent years, China's economy is playing an important role in the world. More and more China's products swarm into international market to compete with the products from other countries. Besides the quality guarantee, proper advertisement is an indispensable sword in the competition. Good advertisement translation can arouse the potential consumers'interest, stimulate their buying desire and enlarge the sale market. Therefore, a successful advertisement translation determines the existence of the product in international market.The thesis attempts to make a tentative study on Chinese-English commercial advertising translation from the perspective of Skopos theory. The author gives description on previous study on advertising translation, indicates the defects and points out the necessity of the study on Chinese-English advertising translation.Skopos theory, which is established by Katharina Reiss and Hans J. Vermeer in the 1980s, is the key theory in German school. It brought action theory into functionalism. Vermeer introduced Skopos to translation process, stating that any action is purposeful. He argues that translation is an action, and that translation process should be determined by translation purpose.The author describes the advertising language and its special functions and holds that Skopos theory is effective in guiding Chinese-English advertising translation. The language and cultural difference can influence translators on choosing translation methods. Thus the present thesis makes a general study on English and Chinese advertisements both in terms of language and in terms of culture by using some advertisements examples.Enlightened by Vermmer's skopos theory, the author of this thesis makes a tentative study on Chinese-English advertisements translation, agrees the target-text oriented translation strategy, and puts forward five translation methods. And this thesis states that flexible translation methods should be adopted to deal with Chinese-English advertisement translation, and, sometimes, several translation methods are used together to achieve the translation purpose. The only criterion to test whether a Chinese-English advertisement translation is successful is the communicative purpose of the target text, which means to persuade the English-speaking consumers to buy the advertised product.This thesis contains six parts, including the introduction and the conclusion.The introduction gives an overall description concerning the situation of the Chinese-English advertising translation, states the significance and the objective of the study. In this thesis a general introduction to advertising and advertising language is given and the comparative study of Chinese and English advertisements is declared, from the prospective of language and culture. By introducing the main concepts and three rules of the Skopos theory, the present thesis illustrates that the Skopos theory can guide advertising translation well. Under the guidance of Skopos theory, the translation strategy and methods theory are put forward. The conclusion generalizes the whole thesis briefly, summarizes the main view points of the author, points out the contributions as well as the limitations of the study, and gives suggestions for further study.