Study Of Advertising Translation Under The Guidance Of German Functionalist Approaches

With the rapid progress of China’s commodity economy and globalization, lots offoreign goods pour into Chinese market when Chinese goods are exported to foreignmarkets. Therefore, both domestic and foreign enterprises should invest abundantcapital to expand international market and build up internaitonal product image. Withthe popularity of mass media, as the outcome of cross-cultural communication andinternational economic exchange, advertising has become an integral part of people’slife. Greater importance is attached to advertising translation as well.The big differences between Chinese and English make advertising translation arather complicated job. Furthermore, advertising translation is not an imitative activityof reproducing faithfully the message of the source text but a dynamic one of active,creative intepretation which suggests adaptations of the source text to the target culture.Henceforce, we must combine the special stylistic features, purpose and funtions ofadvertising with proper translation theories. Traditional translation theories, such as“faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance”,“fidelity”,“equivalence” etc., have failedto meet the requirement of modern soceity on advertising translation.German functionalist approaches emphasize the role of text purpose in translationprocess, which has opened up a new perspective to translation studies. A majorcontribution of the theory is that it provides a theoretical foundation for someunconventional translation methods such as adaptation, deletion and addition etc. Suchtranslation methods are frequently employed in advertising translation.The thesis, in the framework of German functionalist approaches, aims atapplying functionalist approaches to advertising translation and finding feasibletranslation strategies and methods with rich examples. Functionalist approach is a kindof Skopos-rule dominated theoretical system, showing high scientificity andoperability in advertising translation.