Commercial Advertisement Translation From The Perspective Of Intertextuality

With the development of commercial economy and the increase of people’s livingstandard, commercial advertisement has become a necessary part of people’s life. Fiercemarket competition makes the role of commercial advertisement more and more important.The transnational product promoting effect is particularly affected by the commercialadvertisement translation. Since the English language, culture and thinking patterns are quitedifferent from their Chinese counterparts, the Chinese-English translation of commercialadvertisement is a quite complicated and flexible problem. Although a lot of previousresearches have been done on commercial advertisements and intertextuality respectively,intertextuality-based commercial advertisement translation is still a relatively new field thathas been scarcely touched upon.Out of above consideration, the present research is intended to apply the theory ofintertextuality to the study of commercial advertisement translation, aiming to address thefollowing questions:(i) how intertextuality is embodied in commercial advertisements atmicro-and macro-levels?(ii) what kinds of intertextual relationships are involved incommercial advertisement translation?(iii) what kinds of intertextual strategies are frequentlytaken in commercial advertisement translation?(iv) what are the practical values ofintertextual translation of commercial advertisements?This research takes a qualitative approach to the study of commercial advertisementtranslation. A great sum of advertising examples have been drawn from the internet, TVprograms, books, magazines and research papers as well as the out-door posters to supportthe arguments.Based on Kristeva et al’s theory of intertextuality, the present research has arrived at thefollowing findings:First, the intertextuality of commercial advertisements penetrates almost all levels oflanguage use, including both micro-and macro-levels. At micro-levels, commercialadvertisements might have phonetic intertextuality, morphological intertextuality, syntactic intertextuality, semantic intertextuality or rhetorical textuality while at macro-levels,commercial advertisements also have generic intertextuality and cultural intertextuality.Second, commercial advertisement translation involves intertextual relationshipsbetween different texts, genres and cultures. The intertextual strategies frequently adopted forcommercial advertisement translation include transliteration, imitation translation, adaptedtranslation, quotation translation and creative translation.Third, intertextual translation of commercial advertisements has its practical valuessuch as attention value, associative value, memory value and aesthetic value.This thesis is concluded by pointing out that the translator should pay more attention tothe language proficiency, cultural knowledge, psychology and aesthetic value of the targetaudiences from different sources and try their best to meet the audiences’ expectations, andthat the translator’s quotations and imitations should be oriented to the establishment offavorable associations in the target language consumers.