A Study On Translation Of English And Chinese Commercial Advertisements From The Perspective Of Memetics

With the rapid development of the market economy, advertising as an effective means to promote products, has become an essential part of people’s lives. A good advertisement can help consumers to understand the product better and thus to guide consumption and to improve product sales, to develop new markets, to achieve brand awareness; Conversely, a bad advertisement might hinder the sales of products, reduce product sales, or even have a negative impact on product and brand image.At the economic globalization present, many companies introduce international development strategies and gradually open up foreign markets, and products from different countries have begun to exchange. Under this situation, translation of advertising languages, as an important medium of passing on intercultural information, is getting more and more attention from the enterprises. Enterprises are beginning to try to achieve perfection on advertising translation, to promote their products, to increase sales of products abroad, to grab global market share, to enhance the brand’s international profile and influence.As an emerging theory, Memetics is based on Richard Dawkins’s theory of evolution, presents new laws of culture duplication spreading, namely "meme influenced and spread by imitation and copying each other between human brains"(Dawkins,1976:86). This theory provides a new perspective for many areas of theoretical research, which includes commercial advertisement translation field. From the perspective of Memetics, strong meme in commercial advertising, is a decoding transformation through a translator, then translator uses the target language to re-code, and to enable copying of the information, which is successfully decoded by consumers, and absorbed and infected and eventually leads to the desire to buy, to the purchase of the goods, and to further effective dissemination of advertising. This is what Memetics embodies as part of commercial advertising.This paper, through the statement of Memetics and its translation process narrative, shows how it is replicated in the translation process, and implemented in a cross-cultural communication the process of evolution. Through the analysis on the theory of memes replication process, it is shown that no matter whether it is advertising language memes, or translation language memes, memes can be divided into two categories as genotype and phenotype meme. This article does some analysis of examples of different types of advertising texts, explores strategies that Memetics can be used for translation of advertising genotypes memes and phenotype memes, hoping that Memetics can provide some methods in the application of English-Chinese translation of advertising language.