A Study Of Ambiguity And Its Translation In Advertising From The Perspective Of Speech Act Theory

Ambiguity is a common and ubiquitous phenomenon in natural language. Occurring quite often, ambiguity is exploited to achieve special effects and certain pragmatic purposes, and this is especially true in advertising. As an important marketing tool, advertising has become increasingly important in our daily life nowadays. Advertisers employ ambiguity in advertising in the hope that it could make advertising effective and persuade target consumers to take actions. Therefore, it is of significance to study ambiguity in advertising.The thesis aims to explore ambiguity and its translation in advertising in the framework of speech act theory. It attempts to answer three questions:1) is speech act theory explanatory in the analysis of ambiguity in advertising?2) How does ambiguity contribute to effective advertising?3) How to maintain or reproduce in the target text ambiguity from the source text?The author uses about60headlines or slogans of advertising for case study although more than100pieces have been selected from books, articles and television programs. In the thesis, firstly the key concept of speech act theory, such as trichotomy of speech acts, classifications of speech acts as well as indirect speech act are applied to the analysis of ambiguity and its pragmatic functions are also explored on the part of consumers as well as advertisers. After investigating the positive use of ambiguity in advertising, the thesis also discusses how to treat ambiguity in advertising translation based on the pragmatic equivalence principle, which originates from speech act theory.It can be found that speech act theory has explanatory force in the analysis of ambiguity in advertising. On this theoretical foundation, we can gain a better understanding of the features and classifications of ambiguity. The reason why ambiguity is so widely employed in advertising is that it can bring about perlocutionary effects and pragmatic functions. For the consumers, ambiguity is able to achieve interesting, artistic and humorous effects, and for the advertisers, it is helpful in cutting down on costs, protecting advertisers and realizing their ultimate goals. As for how to deal with ambiguity in advertising translation, the thesis concludes that ambiguity is to be translated in order to achieve pragmalinguistic equivalence and sociopragmatic equivalence. Several rendering strategies, such as transliteration, agreement, compensation and splitting are proposed to achieve the pragmalinguistic equivalence. However, the illocutionary force of the original advertising also involves cultural factors, so sociopragmatic equivalence should be taken into account to deal with cultural diversity as well as cultural universality.The thesis has made it clear how ambiguity contributes to effective advertising and what rendering strategies should be employed when dealing with different ambiguities in different contexts. Speech act theory is a relatively new approach to the study of inter-cultural communication. The thesis also proves the explanatory force of speech act theory. Hopefully, the present study will shed new light on the study of ambiguity in general and translation of ambiguity in advertising in particular.