On Translation Equivalence Of The Commercial Advertisement-A Research From The Perspective Of The Functional Grammar

Commercial advertisements have become an essential channel of introducing and selling products. Different from other genres, the ultimate purpose of the commercial advertisements is to arouse interest, to attract attention, to stimulate desire in order to conduct the actual purchasing actions. Therefore, in translating the commercial advertisement from one language to the other, the criterion of equivalence should be located on the level of context of culture, which takes the achievement of equivalent social purpose between the source text and translation work as the ultimate criterion for evaluating the translation work. As long as the social purpose of the translated commercial advertisement can be achieved, any kind of translation methods can be adopted.The present thesis takes Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar as the theoretical framework, discussing the dynamic relationship between the genres and the optimum choice of translation strategies, and studying the problem of equivalence from the perspective of genre's social purpose on the level of context of culture.The thesis makes a classification of the selected advertisements taken from English magazines such as Time, ARCHIVE, Traveler and so on from 2005 to 2009. The research attempts to abandon the traditional method of advertisements categorization, taking the three metafunctions as the theoretical basis and dividing the commercial advertisements into two main types:one is the Ideational-metafunction oriented advertisements, and the other is the Interpersonal-metafunction oriented advertisements. Through study, the thesis draws the following tentative conclusions. Different genres require different translation strategies because of their different social purposes. The Ideational-oriented advertisements tend to be handled by literal translation. That is because the main function of such advertisements is to provide the information of the products, and any missing of information in the translation may lead to the departure from the original meaning. However, Interpersonal-oriented ones focus on arousing the feeling of the audience rather than directly delivering information. If without cultural conflict, the literal translation strategy can still be regarded as the first choice in translation work. However if impossible, then the other kinds of translation strategies can be employed such as "literal plus free" or even creative translation strategies like genre transformation, parody translation etc. in order to produce a translated version which can achieve the same social purpose as that of the source advertisement text, hence can receive the same reaction from the audience in the target culture. Therefore, in translating the commercial advertisements, the criterion of equivalence should be located on the level of context of culture. Once the equivalence of social purpose is achieved, the translation will be accepted as a good translation work no matter what kind of translation strategy is applied.