Cultural Adaptation In Advertisement Translation

The further opening-up of China and the consequent increase of foreign business activities have brought the Chinese people a more diversified economic life. With the increasing communication in the international world, to get a more adequate and acceptable translated advertisement has become more and more important in promoting products.This thesis attempts to analyze how the adaptation theory can be applied to advertisement translation in the process of making choices. The author employs a new approach of pragmatics, the adaptation theory, to account for how pragmatic equivalence can be realized by putting forward some modes of adaptation in advertisement translation. By doing so, the author suggests a suitable translation method to improve current advertisement translation.The present study, apart from introduction and conclusion, is divided into four chapters and organized in the following way. Chapter two firstly briefly reviews the research on advertisement translation in China and Western countries, and then presents the problems existing in previous studies. Chapter three begins with the definition of advertisement, then demonstrates the linguistic features of advertisement, characteristics of advertisement translation, and at last elaborates the cultural enrichment and reduction of the advertisement translation. Chapter four is dedicated to a concise review of adaptation theory proposed by Verschueren (1999), with focus on the key notions of adaptation theory and the interrelationship among these key notions. Chapter five offers the theoretical framework for advertisement translation from the perspective of adaptation theory. Based on the detailed explanation on cultural choices in three worlds (physical, social and mental), it is claimed that the adaptation theory offers an insightful account for the practice of advertisement translation. Chapter Six summarizes the major findings of the research and foregrounds some of its implications; it also points out the limitations of the research with some potential directions for further study named.