A Study Of C-E Commercial Advertisement Translation Based On The Approach To Translation As Adaptation And Selection

In modern commercial society, almost nowhere can advertisement not be found. Especially with the global economic integration, communication among countries is becoming more and more frequent. Thus advertisement, as an important form and effective means to promote products, is playing a more and more essential part in boosting the communication of economy and culture, so increasing importance are attached to advertisement translation.Since the1990s, advertisement translation has been a hot topic in the field of translation. Many researches have been undertaken from different theoretical perspectives, such as Cross-culture, Relevance Theory, Skopos Theory, Functional Equivalence, Memetics, etc. In this thesis, Translation adaptation and selection theory proposed by Professor Hu Gengshen is applied to research into C-E commercial advertisement translation by adopting qualitative description and example analysis methods. This theory holds the view that translation is translator-centred and the process of translating is translators’adaptation to the translational eco-environment with both the source text and target language as typical component and the translational eco-environment’s selection of the target text with translator as typical component. Successful translation is the result of the translator’s successful fulfillment of multi-dimensional adaptation and adaptive selection.The author collects several advertisements with both Chinese and English versions from television, newspaper, Internet, posters and billboards to analyse and compare the selection of translating strategies. The author’s analysing process of the translation is undergone with the following two questions:1) What translational eco-environment should the translator adapt to in the process of C-E commercial advertisement translation?2) How can the translator select the target text in the process of C-E commercial advertisement translation?In the researching process, to answer the first question, this thesis analyzes the translational eco-environment that the commercial advertisement should adapt to from communicative, cultural and linguistic dimensions. The purpose of commercial advertisement translation and the psychology demand of the target readers are considered in communicative dimension. The linguistic dimension is mainly about the characteristics of the source language and target language. The culture of the target language and the difference between source language and target language are included in linguistic dimension. When answering the second question, the author analyzes translator’s selection of the target readers, the linguistic expressing practice of target language and translating strategies.The conclusion of this thesis is that the priority ordering of three-dimensional transformations of different text types is different too according to the translational adaptation and selection theory. Commercial advertisement is a kind of vocative text, thus its C-E translation focuses on communication and the communicative effect should be considered as its primary goal, so the translator must adopt different translating strategies according to different adaption and selection with target readers as the centre so as to maximize the effect of the translation.To sum up, there are common characteristics in the translating strategies adopted by successful translators, that is, in linguistic dimension adaption, gorgeous rhetoric Chinese is transformed into plain and accurate English to enable the readers whose mother tongue is English receive the information of the source text.At the end of the thesis, the limitations of the present study and suggestions for the further study are also presented.