Pragmatic Failure In English Advertising Translation And Countermeasures

With the intense globalization, as a media of marketing products, advertisements are playing an important role. In 2010, China overtook Japan to become the second largest economy in the world, and is now of the utmost importance in the global economy. The frequent foreign trade demands further accuracy in advertisement translation.Advertisement texts are being paid more attention by the language researchers.However, the research on advertisement translation, especially between English and Chinese, is far from satisfaction. There are a lot of inappropriate versions of English and Chinese translation in the market,which confuse consumers and make advertisements less effective.On the basis of Thomas'pragmatic failure,the thesis analyzes pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic failures through the illustrations with componential and composing elements of advertisements.The discovery of pragmatic failures in translation include pragmalinguistic failures caused by pragmatic transfer,and sociopragmatic failures resulting from different associative meanings, values, thinking patterns and cultural vacancy between the original and target languages.To avoid pragmatic failures in English and Chinese advertisement translation,both Adaptation Theory and Skopos Theory are applied. Adaptation Theory by Verschueren provides a new angle to understand and explain Pragmatics,which points out that the usage of language is users'continuous choice-making process under different consciousness in order to achieve their aims of communication.Advertisement translation is a communication between the origianl and target languages.The translators of advertisements also make choices and adapt to realize the objectives of advertisements.Skopos Theory holds that translating is a communication and its purposefulness determines the procedure and approaches. Advertisements are a kind of special texts aiming at marketing. Understanding the cultural background of the target language,according to the structures of expectation in terms of aim and function, translators adopt various strategies flexibly to translate advertisements.Thus the translated texts are about to get the target consumers'attention and the commercial aims of advertisements have also come into being.What's more, the thesis can somewhat enhance the accuracy and precision of advertisement translation effectively by exploring the investigations above.