| Advertisement appeared due to the exchange of goods and developed rapidly with the development of commodity economy. As a result, more and more scholars in the field of advertisement and linguistics became interested in advertising language and paid much attention to it. In China, the study of advertising Chinese began in 1980's and the study of advertising English began after those English books on advertisement were translated in Chinese. Now the study of advertising Chinese and English are carried on to a deeper degree and more papers and books on advertising language have come out, but the comparison and contrast of advertising Chinese and advertising English need to be studied with greater efforts.This thesis reviewed the history of advertising language study and gave an brief introduction of the current state and then concluded the similarity and difference of advertising Chinese and advertising English on the basis of summarizing other people's works on advertising language.Both advertising Chinese and advertising English use simple words and rhyme to make the advertisements sound pleasant and usually use simple sentence, omitted sentence, interrogative sentence and imperative sentence to make the advertisements more attractive and easy to remember. Moreover, adjective with positive meaning and adverb areusually used in advertising Chinese and advertising English to express the affirmative tone. At the same time, kinds of rhetoric means are also used in both advertising Chinese and English to make the advertisements have more artistic quality.The difference between advertising Chinese and advertising English are reflected both in the language structure and in social culture. The characteristics in Chinese pronunciation is the reason why in advertising Chinese there are many euphony, double syllables and repeated words. While in advertising English the misspelled words and strange new words created by advertisement makers are often seen. That is because compared with Chinese character, it is much free for English words to change their forms to have different functions. Antithesis is a kind of sentence type with typical characteristics of Chinese language and culture which is seldom found in advertising English.The differences between advertising Chinese and advertising English are an obstacle in advertising translation because some special sentence types and means of rhetoric in Chinese have no equivalence in English. So in advertising translation we should take the rule of "function prior to form" as direction and consider transmitting the functions of the original work to the maximal degree as the aim of advertising translation. This thesis gave a brief introduction of the translation theories home and abroad and concluded that both Nida's function equivalence theory and Newmark's theory of communicatingtranslation are fit for adverting translation.Now the advertising translation in China is in the developing state and the standard of translation is to be improved. In the translation of the brand name, the title, slogan and body of advertisement there are many pragmatic mistakes, which weakened the persuading function of the English version of Chinese advertisement. The main reason of these pragmatic mistakes is the differences in Chinese culture and Western culture. This thesis analyzes the differences from three aspects: collectivism versus individualism, respect of authority versus respect of facts, and implicit way versus direct way. In addition, the difference in social mechanism shouldn't be neglected either. If the translator ignored the functions of Chinese people's viewpoint of value, ways of thinking and China's social organization in Chinese advertisements, and translate the Chinese advertisements directly, he will inevitably make pragmatic mistakes.This thesis takes function equivalence theory and the theory of communicating translation as direction and put forward three rules in advertisement translation which are "natural", "accurate" and "concise", in the hope th... |
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