A Relevance-theoretic Approach To Metaphor Translation Of English Commercial Advertisements

With the rapid development of international trade and market economy, advertisementtranslation has drawn much attention as it is a crucial means for cross-border marketing and brandimage building. Advertisements are glutted with metaphors, whose complexity makesadvertisement translation all the more difficult.This thesis is a tentative study on metaphor translation of English commercial advertisementsunder the guidance of relevance theory. Relevance theory regards communication as a cognitiveactivity and an ostensive-inferential process. It maintains that human communication is governedby the principle of relevance and the core of relevance is the principle of optimal relevance.Relevance theory treats translation as a process of interpretation and inference of the source text.The main task of translation is to seek optimal relevance between the source text and the target textso as to show the original author’s communicative intent.This thesis probes into the process of metaphor translation of English commercialadvertisements from the perspective of relevance theory. The process, which consists of theinterpretation stage and the translation stage, is basically one of searching for optimal relevance.Metaphor is interpreted as an ostensive stimulus, a loose talk and a search for weak implicaturewhile seeking for optimal relevance in the cognitive environment. Three relevant factors should betaken into account in the translation stage, namely, relevance in context, relevance in culture andrelevance in receptor. With plenty of advertisement translation examples, the thesis illustrates suchstrategies as metaphor to metaphor, metaphor to simile and metaphor to non-metaphor. Thestrategies are further divided into seven translation methods. It is suggested that the translatorshould adopt flexible translation methods in an effort to achieve optimal relevance.This study is intended to enrich the study of translation and further improve the quality ofadvertisement translation under the guidance of relevance theory. It is expected that this study willprovide a broader perspective for professional advertisers as well as promote advertisementappreciation, creation and exchanges of global economy and culture.