Language Translation Of Advertising, With An Equivalent Theory To Contemplation

Advertisements is widely used medium of promoting commodities, securing customers, exploiting markets in modern society. As an important way of information communication, it has strong commercial objectives. Undoubtedly it can play the role of having certain impact on people's values and lifestyles and is a kind of intercultural communication. With the rapid development of global economy and the intense competition of international market, the advertisements and advertising translation play an increasingly important role in improving the product's acceptance and are gaining increasing attention. The translation of advertisement also becomes a very important research problem in societal-pragmatics to which linguists and translators pay much attention. On the reference to different opinions,this thesis attempts to explore, from a pragmatic perspective, advertising translation by comparative analyses and qualitative study. The present paper consist of seven chapters. Chapter One,introduction gives a brief account of the topic,such as the social function of the advertisement and its present research. In Chapter Two,the article states that pragmatics, a branch of newly developing linguistics, is often defined as the study of language use and its rules,and translation,dealing with the transference of meaning between two languages, is a communicative process which essentially involves the author, the translator and the translation reader. Based on elaborating some relevent concepts to pragmatics,which have provided theorietical foundation for pragmatic translation of advertisement, the paper provides some reasonable explanation and directions that the theory of pragmatics can be adopted as a method to make a research in advertisement translation. With the common studying objects: comprehension and expression, pragmatics is closely related to translation. Chapter Three focuses on contextual factors. The author holds that context, an important theory in pragmatics, is the key to understand language. It has explanatory function and the choice of words really depends on the context,therefore such factors as linguistic context, situational context and cultural context must be taken into consideration in the course of translation. In Chapter Four,the key part of the article, a tentative endeavor is made to describe the pragmatic translation of advertisement from pragmatic language equivalent translation, social pragmatic equivalent translation and comprehensive pragmatic equivalent translation. It presents , within a pragmatic framework,advertisement translation can be regarded as a dynamic process of interpretation.The essence of advertisement translation is seeking the maximal equivalence in meaning.Since meaning is determined by the linguistic contexts and by the communicative intentions of the speaker or writer, pragmatics, which studies meaning in use and in specific context, can have constraints upon and generalizaing power for translation.Thus applying the theories of pragmatics into advertising translation can activate translation research and at the same time, offer a new perspective to explain the problems in translation and finally achieve the goal of pragmatic equivalence between source language and target language. Chapter Five analyzes some pragmatic failures appeared in advertising translation from the aspects of language,culture, custom, view of value and thinking etc. To avoid pragmatic failures in advertising translation the translator should stick closely to the intention of advertisement and adopt the"cretive translation"strategy. For Chapter Six,in light of the above analysis, the present paper supplies some strategies and techniques applied in advertising translation. At the same time, an effort was made in the study of cultures and marketing functions conveyed in the advertising. Chapter Seven draws the conclusion advertising translation is not merely the translation of one language into another, but also of the cultures, and the translation process is the one of re-constructing the information of source discourse with the context. So the correct understanding of the context is the premise of translation. The analysis should help to illustrate how the theoretical insights of pragmatics could reform the practice of advertisement translation .