The Translation Strategy Of Advertisement Based On The Unequivalence Between Chinese And English Conceptual Metaphors

With the rapid development of the commodity economy, advertisement, as the new mode of information dissemination and an important means of merchandising, has become the key subject in the field of translation. Advertisers generally believe that metaphorical advertisement can help consumers to grab the essence of the advertisement and recognize the product, so that consumers would have a better impression of the product and a stronger desire to purchase. Therefore metaphor has been widely used in advertising and the quality of metaphor translation directly affects the result of the translation of advertisements.In recent years, studies on metaphor have moved from the rhetorical level to a cognitive level, brought a lot of inspiration to the research of metaphor translation. More and more scholars have noticed that metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon, but also a powerful tool for human thinking and cognition. Therefore the translation of metaphor is no longer fixed on the equivalence of language form and semantic, but pays more attention to the necessary conditions of metaphor and the root causes that affect the translation of metaphor.This article is on the perspective of cognition and will do a qualitative and quantitative comparative study on metaphor translation between Chinese and English advertisements under the guidance of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory. The purposes of this article are:1) to do a incisive analysis of the cognitive function of metaphor in advertisements and reveals that the cognitive function of conceptual metaphors and the basic function of advertisement are basically consistent; 2) to testify that both Chinese and English language systems have the systematism and cultural consistence of conceptual metaphors and reveals the underlying causes for the possibility of the translation of metaphor between Chinese and English; 3) to look for the unequivalence between Chinese and English conceptual metaphor systems and reveal the essential causes and representations for that unequivalence; 4) to further discuss that the results of metaphor translation are always undertranslation and prove that the functional equivalence theory is inapplicable in the translation of advertisement, causing failure in producing the same associations triggered by the original image due to the unequivalence between Chinese and English metaphors; 5) through a systematically comparative analysis of 100 pieces of well-known English advertisements and their official translated Chinese versions to summarize some methods in order to reduce information loses during translation process of metaphors and improve translation strategies for the translation of advertisements.Through systematical analysis on cases of advertisement translation from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, it is revealed that cultural communications among nations brought the similarity and translatability of cognitive systems, but on the other hand, different national cultures and ideologies also derived different cognitive experiences and it is exactly such experience diversities hindered the translation of metaphor. Therefore, the basis of metaphor translation is the overlap of cultural experience in different nations. This article does a respective study of metaphor mapping and metaphor types based on a qualitative and quantitative comparative analysis of 100 pieces of English advertisements and their translated Chinese versions. The study shows that the reflections of unequivalence between Chinese and English metaphors embodied in the difference or missing of target domain in metaphoric mapping on one hand and the preference of conceptual metaphor types on the other. The purpose of reducing the information loses during the metaphorical conversion can be obtained by properly handling the mapping including adjustment, additions and omissions, and then adjusts the metaphor types according to the culture orientation and cognitive system of the target language. Such strategies can help better highlight the advertising purpose while maintain the poetic function of advertising at the same time.