On Translation Of Rhetorical Devices In Advertisement - From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

With the mushrooming and flourishing of joint venture companies and the fast development of multi-national business, there is a growing need for advertisement translation, which is the main communication tool between international companies. As a special specific branch of translation, advertising translation has its uniqueness and its own rules and regulation, which deserves a systematic study and demands an empirical research.The traditional translation theories represented by equivalence-based translation theories are far from satisfactory when it comes to advertisement translation due to the following reason. The equivalence-based theories pay too much emphasis on achieving formal equivalence between the source language and the target language while ignore the communicative functions of advertisements, which are the major functions of advertisement translation. Relevance theory put forward by Sperber and Wilson in 1986 sheds light on advertising translation. It emphasizes the achievement of optimal relevance in translation, which means the factors such as contextual effects and the cultural differences should be taken into consideration in order to realize the pragmatic effects.Relevance theory has opened up a new perspective to translation, especially to advertisement translation. It provides theoretical foundation for many unconventional specific translation strategies of rhetorical advertising translation such as rhetorical replacement, adaptation of rhetoric, which meet the requirements of advertisement communication.The advertisers try to make full use of all kinds of rhetorical devices in order to make the advertisements more persuasive and appealing. The thesis introduces three levels of rhetorical devices: rhetorical devices on phonetic level, semantic level and syntactic level. Rhyme, pun, metaphor, antithesis, parallelism and other rhetorical devices as well as their corresponding translation strategies are introduced systematically. While translating, much has to be considered about the rhetorical devices in order to make the target readers feel the same way in their cognitive environment.The current thesis consists of four chapters.The first chapter is literature review. It mainly concerns the research background of relevance theory and its key concepts, relevance, optimal relevance and ostensive-inferential communication. The enlightenment of relevance theory to rhetorical advertisement translation is also surveyed in this chapter.Chapter two includes a brief review of advertisement. It contains the definition, functions, classification and language features of advertisement. The features are categorized into lexical, syntactical and rhetorical features.Chapter three is a systematic study of rhetorical devices on phonetic level, semantic level and syntactical level.Chapter four is the most important chapter of the thesis. It studies on the specific translation strategies of rhetorical advertisements from the perspective of relevance theory through abundant cases. The author divides the strategies into three major categories, that is, to translate into the same type of rhetoric, flexible translation of rhetorical advertisements and non-rhetorical advertisements to rhetorical advertisements translation. The thesis concludes that translation is a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic communication act containing double ostensive-inferential processes according to the fact that communication is an ostensive-inferential process in light of relevance theory. The thesis expounds through case studies that different translation strategies of rhetorical devices in advertisements are chosen in accordance with the varied cognitive environment of target receptors. Besides, the thesis summarizes specific translation strategies applicable for specific types of rhetorical devices.Through the whole research it a conclusion can be drawn that relevance theory plays a very important guiding role in rhetorical advertisement comprehension process and translation process.