A Corpus Study On Chinese-English Translation Strategies Of Adjectives In Advertisements

Modifiers, especially adjectives play an important role in various advertisements. Therefore, how to properly translate adjectives is crucial to the success of advertisement translation. The thesis aims to formulate major strategies of adjective translation from Chinese to English on the base of stylistically parallel corpus of advertisements.The thesis first investigates the similarities and differences of adjectives in English and Chinese advertisements. Both Chinese and English advertisements would make use of commendatory adjectives and adjectives of superlative or comparative degrees. However, Chinese adjectives are mostly used as predicates after nouns while English adjectives are more used as modifiers before nouns. In addition, Chinese advertisements are in favor of using more commendatory adjectives while English advertisements seldom overstate the quality of the products. Last, Chinese advertisements prefer to use general or abstract adjectives while English versions prefer to use specific and detailed modifications.In the framework of translation variation theory, the thesis proposes four feasible strategies of adjective translation in advertisements. First, adjectives used as postmodifiers or predicates in Chinese should usually be converted to premodifiers. Second, adjectives in Chinese can be translated as adverbials, prepositional phrases or nouns. Third, the translation calls for a process of semantic variation from general to specific or omission of the redundant adjectives. Fourth, Chinese adjectives often need to be reorganized with the head nouns in translation. That is, adjectives need to be integrated with other adjectives in accordance with the context, and some adjectives need to be combined with other nouns in the translation.