On Translation Of Metaphor In English Advertisement From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

In a cognitive perspective and based on relevance theory, this thesis explores the strategies and principles applicable in translating metaphors in advertisements from English into Chinese. As a unique form of human communication, advertisements serve as a special platform of interaction between goods and service providers and the target audience—potential consumers. Due to the heightened tempo of globalization, advertisement and its translation are gaining increasing weight in international communication. Responses to advertisements are featured with ostensive-inferential processes involving such factors as information intention and communication intention. A common rhetorical device as it is often thought to be, metaphor in advertisement is a condense-meaning-packed tool to attract attention, stimulate consumption, and ultimately promote publicity and sales of products. Translational treatments of metaphors in advertisements, therefore, play a determinant role in the overall quality of English-Chinese renderings.As a kind of language communication behavior, the metaphor in advertisement could be effectively explained by the principle of optimal relevance and ostensive-inferential mode in relevance theory. This thesis is mainly concerned with the metaphor translation in English advertisement under the guidance of relevance theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson (2001). In addition, there exists a dynamic approach to the understanding of metaphor in relevance theory. In the framework of relevance theory, translation is regarded as an ostensive-inferential process in which the translator would make a choice between the intention of the original author and the expectation of the target reader. According to the ostension (or implication) of the author of the original language, the translator tries to find out the cognitive context that makes sense to the reader of the target language, and in this process the identity of the translator changes---from the acceptor to the communicator, then the reader of the target language could reason out the information in accordance with the cognitive context of the original author. Translation under this theory concentrates on the understanding of metaphor, and the inference in this process is automatic and spontaneous, so people can obtain the optimal effects with minimum efforts.Based on this theory, this thesis proposes five strategies to metaphor translation, that is, to reconstruct the same image in the target language; to replace the image in the source language by a standard image in the target language; to compensate the gap between the source language and the target language; to condense the source text into a brief target language and dynamic combination strategy, and then tries to put forward new understandings and analyses metaphor translation in English advertisement under the principle of relevance theory.