A Study On E-C Text Translation Of Commercial Advertisements From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

With the rapid development of commodity economy and globalization of economicand cultural integration, the economic function of commercial advertising is becomingmore and more closely related with its cultural function. Commercial advertising hasbecome an integral part of people’s daily life, influencing culture, values and even thequality of people’s lives. As for enterprises, commercial advertising is an indispensablemeans of product promotion. The ultimate purpose of advertisements is to promote salesand to achieve the effect of attracting consumers and persuading them to take action. Sothe advertising translation should focus on the re-creation of the expected function of theoriginal text in the target environment. In order to achieve this desired effect, translatorsshould make the necessary adjustments to the version of the source text in order to adapt tothe mentality of the consumers. The traditional translation techniques that are based onfunctional equivalence are limited to the reproduction of the form or content of the sourcetext, which are unable to adapt to the mentality of the present consumers in the newenvironment. In many cases，it cannot reach the effect of attracting or persuading targetreaders to take action. However, the German functionalist translation approaches break thetraditional model and linguistics translation theories based on equivalence. They believetranslation should not only depend on the analysis of the ST’s characteristics，but shouldjudge whether TT possesses specific function in accordance with its environment. Germanfunctionalist approaches have widened the scope of research and provided a newperspective for translation studies.According to the Skopos Theory, any translation must have a purpose or achieve acertain function. Whether TT is faithful to ST or not it is determined by the purpose oftranslation. In addition, the differences between TT and ST in language and culture shouldbe taken into consideration as well. In the process of translation, translators shouldtransform the symbols that have specific meanings in ST culture into needed languagesymbols in the TL culture to achieve the ultimate purpose. The core concept of the SkoposTheory is the skopos rule, according to which the whole translation process, including thechoice of translation methods and techniques, is determined by the purpose that translational action aims to achieve. Skopos Theory, as a multi-standard theory dominatedby skopos rule, enlightens us that translators, on the basis of analyzing ST and aiming atachieving expected function of TT, can adopt various translation techniques in translation.Taking the Skopos Theory as guide in the research of advertisement translation, theauthor will explore the effective translation methods with specific analysis and examples.This thesis is divided into six parts. The first part is the introduction to researchbackground, significance and fundamental structure of the thesis. Chapter two is literaturereview, which mainly discusses the previous and present studies in commercial advertisingtranslation both abroad and in China. Chapter three introduces the related key concepts andtheory such as text translation, Reiss’ text typology, Vermeer’s Skopos theory, Manntari’sTheory of Translation Action and Nord’s Function plus Loyalty. Chapter four is devoted tothe general description of the stylistic features of English commercial Advertising,including definition, functions, essential components and verbal features. Based on SkoposTheory, Chapter five analyzes examples from the prospective of principles of skopos rule,coherence rule and fidelity rule. The author indicates some elements can affect the texttranslation of commercial advertising from English to Chinese and points out someeffective translation skills such as structure shift, omission, repetition, rewording andcreative treason. The final section is the conclusion, which summarizes the chief views ofthis thesis and its creative points of the research, at the same time, the author also givessome limitations about this thesis.