A Study On Chinese-English Advertisement Translation:a Perspective Of Skopostheorie

This thesis attempts to make a study on Chinese-English advertisement translation from the perspective of Skopostheorie. It applies Skopostheorie to the study of Chinese-English advertisement translation to analyze the factors influencing the translation and proposes the three rules of Skopostheorie as the translation principles to adopt target-reader-oriented translation strategy and flexible translation methods in order to realize the purpose of C-E advertisement translation, improve its quality and better serve the development of advertising industry.With China’s entry into WTO and the acceleration of economic globalization, advertisement translation becomes increasingly important. However, there are still problems in C-E advertisement translation practice which has greatly impeded the development of advertising industry. Such embarrassing situation attributes partly to the translator’s poor professional skills. More importantly, some translators are still influenced by traditional translation theories and view faithfulness and equivalence to source text as an important standard in translation practice. Since advertisement translation aims to persuade target readers and the vast linguistic and cultural differences are inevitable, a more systematic and feasible translation theory is called for.The Skopostheorie which appeared in the1970s defines translation as a kind of source-text based translational action that is guided by the translation skopos. Advertisement translation is the pragmatic translation that has a definite purpose to achieve. Any advertisement translation that fails to perform the function of promoting sales is not successful. As a result, Skopostheorie which emphasizes the realization of translation purpose offers effective guidance to it. In the framework of Skopostheorie, the source text is viewed as only an offer of information and the status of which is lower than it was in traditional translation theories. That is to say, translators are no longer confined within the strategy and method focus on equivalence to source text on lexical level or syntactic level. Instead, they are entitled to choose appropriate strategies and methods accordingly to realize its intended purpose.The thesis is placed under the framework of Skopostheorie. First it states the definition and functions of advertisement as well as the features of English advertisement. Then, it introduces the content and rules of Skopostheorie. The thesis points out the problems in Chinese-English advertisement translation and explores the reasons. The thesis discusses factors that influence Chinese-English advertisement translation within the framework of Skopostheorie and puts forward the three rules of Skopostheorie as translation principles to offer a target-reader-oriented translation strategy and translation methods such as abridgment, amplification, logical restructuring, analogy, imitation and literal translation which can be employed in C-E advertisement translation to improve its quality.