The Strategy Of Advertisement Translation Based On The Relevance Theory

With the economic development and the enhancing of international trade and cooperation, advertising has gone beyond the role of a symbol of the market but has become some kind of cultural product. The social role it plays is becoming important day by day. As a special form of communication, the clear business purpose and unique cultural character of advertising have made it a process of reasoning rather than encoding and decoding. Therefore, a pragmatic perspective in the analysis of advertisements would hopefully be more rewarding.The French linguist and philosopher Sperber and British linguist Wilson put forward the Relevance Theory in their book:Relevance:Communication and Cognition in1986. The theory puts its focus on the human communication and understanding of the discourse, whose influence has surpassed the area of pragmatic and extended into the field of translation. It is in the perspective of cognition that the Relevance Theory tries to study the translation of advertising.The research of the translation of advertising in this paper is just based on the Relevance Theory to study the process of communication in the translation of the advertising. It first gives the goal, significance and the framework of the research, and then introduces the definition, classification, function and features of advertising and further summarizes the traditional translation theories and their standards. Later, this paper introduces the Relevance Theory systematically, including its principle, contextual effects, cognitive environment, mutual manifestness, ostensive inference and its theory of translation. Finally, a number of samples are analyzed to demonstrate the advantages of applying the Relevance Theory to the translation of advertising; these advantages mainly include:Ⅰ. The standard of advertising translation from the perspective of the Relevance Theory is whether the pragmatic effect of the translated advertising can achieve the purpose and function in the context of the target language, which is to encourage the customers to purchase the product or service or accept the advice. Ⅱ. The Relevance Theory emphasizes the importance of context, which is the standard of the effect of the translation is measured in context of the target language.Ⅲ. According to the Relevance Theory, inference plays an important role in the process of the advising translation, and this importance can be seen in the translator’s inference of the communicative intent of the original advertiser and the culture of the target language and " in the creative strategies that he or she then employs in the translation; these strategies include abridgement, expansion and adaptation. They together may testify the positive role the Relevance Theory plays in the translation of advertising.