A Study Of Metonymy In Chinese-english Translation Of Product Advertisment

Product advertisement is a unique pragmatical text aiming to "arouse the intention, hold the intention, and enhance the purchase behaviors." Therefore, traditional translation norms of "faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance", or Equivalence Theory are not applicable in product advertisement translation, as distinct from common translations. There is a particular view expressed as to the translation norms of Chinese English (C-E) translation of product advertisements, that is, translated advertisements are still advertisements:they have to be faithful to the form and structure of native advertisements in English; otherwise, the translated advertisements will conflict with the target culture, since the forms and structures of advertisements are deeply rooted in English cultural background and cognitive context.Metonymy, which gains its foothold in human's cognitive experience, reflects, constructs, and assumes one kind of experience by the aid of another kind of experience. As a basic thinking pattern, metonymy contributes to generation of tangible and perceptible experience by means of more salient formal experience. This working mechanism is similar to translation in that translation produces a target text on the strength of the source text. In this thesis, therefore, the author attempts to investigate the working mechanism of metonymy in C-E translation of product advertisements from a cognitive perspective, and to explore its hints on translation strategies and techniques for product advertisement translation. What is more, the author also addresses the problem what superiority metonymy theory possesses over traditional translation approaches by way of exposition and contrastive case analyses of thirty pairs of advertisement translations.The overall findings reveal that product advertising is in fact a metonymic process in which the advertisers utilize some part of the product to substitute the entire product, or they utilize some of the product features to stand for the whole product. With reference to C-E translation of product advertisement, the author regards it as a metonymy conversion process that operates within an event Idealized Cognitive Model (ICM) of information reprocessing, within which the metonymic models of Chinese product advertisements provide mental access to metonymic models of English product advertisements. The task of translation is just to convert Chinese metonymic models to acceptable English metonymic models. Due to cultural differences, separate translating strategies and techniques are required in terms of the type of metonymies, anyway. In the author's opinion, on the one hand, literal translation is appropriate for translation of shared metonymic models in two cultures, since it not only helps retain original product image, but also makes the translation conform to English advertisements' structure and appeal to English consumers' psychological expectations. On the other hand, domescating strategies such as liberal translation, adaptation and substitution strategy, and foreignizing strategies such as literal translation and transliteration plus note are respectively suitable for translation of different or cultural-specific metonymic models in Chinese.In conclusion, metonymic translation is endowed with unparalleled advantages over traditional translation theories in product advertisement translation, as long as it masters the metonymic features in cognition and language in English and Chinese product advertisements, and it appeals to the psychological expectations of western consumers.