Relevance Theory And Metaphor Translation In English Advertisement

Nowadays, international business and market economy are developing rapidly, so advertising has spread over everywhere in our daily life. As we know, English is the most important international business language, so English advertisement dominates the international market. As a result, English advertisement translation is playing a more and more important role.Because the distinctive language systems and culture are different between English and Chinese, it is very hard to achieve a complete equivalence and translators generally meet great difficulties in achieving the traditional translation criteria of equivalence. In English advertising language, metaphor is widely used and turns out to be an effective and significant device. In other words, metaphor is the soul of advertising and advertising translation is metaphor translation. Therefore, knowing the features of metaphor and how to effectively render them in the target language will be of great help to the publicity of the products advertised.A complete equivalence is hardly to be achieved due to the distinctive language systems and cultural differences between English and Chinese as well as a special functional stylistic of advertisement, and translators generally meet great difficulties in achieving the traditional translation criteria of equivalence. Relevance theory offers a new theoretical basis for translators, namely, the relevance justifies the means, and the strategies and methods are determined by the intended optimal relevance, which is suitably applied to the translation of such pragmatic texts as English advertisements with an intended purpose. The translation of English advertisements is not just a language-to-language transform--ation but rather a cultural shift. The English and Chinese advertisements are characterized by linguistic and cultural-specificity, the cultural inheritance and aesthetic ways are greatly different as well.Since the1940s, linguists and translators had researched pragmatic translation with general translation theories, which was widely disputed. However, with the increase of global economy, pragmatic texts were frequently found in magazines and on the Internet, and this phenomenon raised great discussions in translation field about the general translation theories applied in the text of a special writing style. The introducing of "Relevance Theory" solves the thorny issue in translation studies and practice. This thesis is focusing on the E-C translation of metaphors in advertisements from a prospective angle of "Relevance Theory", by adopting the authentic selected English advertisements, a real reflection of situations on metaphor translation in English advertisements, bearing scientific values in translation studies. With the aim of finding the general problems arising in E-C translation of metaphors in advertisements, this thesis abandons the traditional translation theory of "faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance" and the traditional strategies of "equi-valence" to the original text, but turns to carry out a new study over the metaphor translation of English advertisements in light of Relevance Theory.