On Untranslatability And Its Transformation In Chinese-English Translation

Translation serves as a bridge between different cultures. It not only gathers people from different cultures together, but also promotes economic development. Advertising translation is the first step for enterprise to enter foreign markets, so advertising translation shall be attached full attention to. However, due to cultural and linguistic differences, untranslatability has become a major obstacle in cross-cultural communication. And it is a long-standing issue in the field of translation. Linguistic untranslatability refers to that, in aspects of language forms, the target language has no corresponding form features to the source language. The cause of cultural untranslatability is that, in the culture of target language, there are no contextual features which have the same textual functions as the original language.This thesis tries to explore manifestations of linguistic and cultural untranslatability at all levels. Linguistic untranslatability can be manifested at phonetic, graphic and rhetorical level, while cultural untranslatability can be divided into untranslatability of substantial culture and spiritual culture. Actually, untranslatability is often manifested through a variety of losses of source language, such as loss of rhetorical devices, loss of implicit information, loss of humor, etc. This thesis also attempts to propose several methods to compensate untranslatability, and it takes advertising translation as examples. Untranslatability is analyzed at levels of advertising slogans and trademark words in details. These compensation methods are applied to transformation of untranslatability of advertising language. In this thesis, advertising cases are all translated from Chinese into English. Through analysis, we find that translatability of some untranslatable advertising language can be achieved by some compensation methods, while other untranslatability, although improved after compensation, may still fail to achieve the ideal effect. We also find that some untranslatability is dynamic. As society develops, they will enter the target culture through cross-cultural communication, get accepted by the target culture, and finally turn into translatability over time. Other untranslatability may remain the same due to its linguistic property.