A Study Of Advertisement Translation Strategies From The Perspective Of Memetics

Advertisement plays an important part in modern life and it is the most common way for businessmen to propagate their commodities or services to the public. With the rapid development of the global economy in the 19 th century, advertisement becomes increasingly significant to modern society and the means of advertisement flourish with each passing day. In particular, as the globalization is speeding up and the modern science and technology develops rapidly, the propagation and spread of advertisement has been beyond the borders. In the process, advertisement translation also becomes a cultural and commercial activity of common practice. In practice, advertisement does not simply aim to publicize a certain commodity or service by means of verbal part(i.e. language) or non-verbal parts(e.g. color, image, illustration, music, layout etc.); more importantly, the ultimate goal of it is to maximize commercial profits. Therefore, the task of advertisement translation lies in two levels: one is to convey its ideas to the audience which are embodied in advertisement from source text to target text; the other to win maximum potential buyers for a certain commodity or service. In this sense, advertisement translation is concerned about not only language transmission, but also profit gaining, as advertisement does, in which the translator should take into full consideration language translation strategies and many other factors in relation to such fields as inter-cultural communication, marketing and sociology etc.Since the proposal of memetics, it has been exerting great influence on numerous major disciplines and it is applied widely to many fields such as marketing, information technologies, and sustainability space, among which memetics sheds new light on translation and marketing. Since advertisement translation is closely connected with both translation studies and marketing, it is definitely necessary to make it work well by rendering both in linguistic level and marketing level. Fortunately, some memetic theories can provide some practical and effective solutions to the obstacles relating to linguistics and marketing. For instance, memetic translation strategies suggested by Andrew Chesterman, which fall into 3 major groups, can provide practical and effective solutions to linguistic difficulties in advertisement translation. On the other hand, the life cycle of meme and selection criteria proposed by Francis Heylighen enlightens the translators to take into consideration the process of advertisement translation propagation and various factors affecting the effects of the translation.The paper makes a tentative study of the application of the memetic theories mentioned above to advertisement translation, using abundant of bilingual advertisement between English and Chinese to exemplify the feasibility of the application. At the very beginning, the paper makes a brief introduction to meme, memetics, advertisement and advertisement translation as well as the memetic theories applied to the study and the significance of the study. Next, the paper presents a literature review of international studies of memetics, domestic studies of meme and memetics, international studies of advertisement and advertisement translation. Then, the paper introduces the theoretical framework applied in the study and makes a detailed analysis of the memetic translation strategies concerning language and their application to advertisement translation, meme selection criteria strategies concerning the transmission or propagation effect and their application to advertisement translation.The paper initially proposes some memetic theories as translation strategies to be applied to advertisement translation between English and Chinese and systematically discusses the feasibility of these strategies to advertisement translation between English and Chinese by using abundant of relevant examples. The tentative study proves the feasibility of most of these translation strategies and it enlightens the author and other translators to have a new look at translation, in particular, advertisement translation.