A Study Of Chinese-English Advertisement Translation In The Light Of Skopos Theory

Advertising, along with the rapid development of international trade and cultural exchanges, has been becoming more and more important around the whole global economy in the21st century. As a member of Bricks which includes Brazil, Russia, India and China, numerous foreign commodities are entering China, and at the same time more and more Chinese enterprises are promoting their products on the international markets. Chinese enterprisers must adopt appropriate advertisements in order to make sure that their products or services can be better known and more acceptable to foreign customers, so that their products or services can be more competitive on the international market. How to translate Chinese advertisements into English, faithful in content, emotionally attractive in form, and culturally acceptable in psychology, has become the focus of people’s attention. The study of translating Chinese advertisement into English is of great realistic significance and practical value.Advertisement translation belongs to the realm of pragmatic linguistics, and it differs from other kinds of translation. The aim of advertisement translation is to "advertise", that is to make potential consumers of certain product or service to have buying desire and buying behavior. From the above sense, it is far from enough only to achieve information equivalence between source language and target language. The target text of advertisement should be able to persuade consumers’ buying act. In this research, the Skopos Theory put forward by Han. J. Vermeer is regarded as the guiding principle of Chinese-English advertisement translation.Skopos Theory has been first put forward in early1970s by Han Vermeer, the translation theorist of German functionalists. Under the guidance of Skopos Theory, translation is no longer an equivalent transfer of information from one culture or language to another. It has totally changed the status of the source text and the target text and the relationship between the two. Skopos Theory puts the translator into a wider social context, and the translator should take into consideration all the participants, such as the source text addressees, the target text addressees, and the translation initiator as well as the translator. It emphasizes the status of the translator as an expert in his or her field, to be accorded the same kind of recognition as any other expert. Skopos Theory argues that the major task of translation, essentially as a practice of international inter-cultural communication, is to facilitate the materialization of the functions that the target text is meant to achieve in the target culture. According to Vermeer, there are three rules in Skopos Theory, namely, the skopos rule, the coherence rule and the fidelity rule. According to this theory, this thesis argues that the fulfillment of the intended functions of the target text should be the guiding principle in Chinese-English advertisement translation. This thesis is an analysis of the application of Skopos Theory to the practice of Chinese-English advertisement translation.This thesis consists of six chapters in all. The first chapter is the introduction part, which is concerned with the background of the research, the purpose of the research, and the overall structure of the thesis.The second chapter is the literature review of the research. It can be divided into three parts. The first part is the introduction of advertisement, from the perspective of its definition, classification and functions. The second part is the historical development of this thesis’theoretical foundation---Skopos theory. The third part is the previous studies related to advertisement translation home and abroad.The third part is the theoretical framework of this research. In this chapter, we will focus our attention on the Skopos Theory. Firstly, it will give a brief definition of Skopos; then some important concepts of Skopos Theory will be introduced; thirdly, it will discuss the three rules of Skopos Theory and briefly analyze the relationship between the three rules. The fourth part is the methodology of the research. It includes the research questions of this thesis, the design of the research, and the description of data collection.The fifth part is the discussion of the application of Skopos Theory to the translation of Chinese advertisements into English. It first of all reviews some problems existing in Chinese-English advertisement translation and analyzes the causes accounting for the mentioned problems, then it discusses the feasibility of the application of Skopos Theory to the translation of Chinese advertisement, finally it illustrates some appropriate translation strategies for Chinese-English advertisement translation under the guidance of Skopos Theory.The last part is a conclusion. It consists of three parts. It first of all summarizes some major findings of this research that may be admitted as contributions to the translation field in general and reemphasizes that Skopos Theory is an important theory in the field of translation, especially in Chinese-English advertisement translation. Then it points out the theoretical implications as well as the practical implications of the research. Finally it points out some limitations in the process of the research and gives a few suggestions to the translators of Chinese advertisements in the near future.