The Application Of Morris's Semiotic Theory In Advertisement Translation

Charles W. Morris (1901-1979) is one of the important representatives of American pragmatism in the mid-20th century. He inherited and developed Peirce's semiotic theory and Mead's social behaviorism, and, on the basis of combining them, he advanced his own semiotic theory-behavioristic semiotics, which has made a significant impact on the following semiotic study.Language, as a complex symbol system, belongs to the category of semiotic research. Meanwhile, translation is closely related to the language, involving the application, interpretation and conversion of different signs, and there are many problems which emerge in the process of advertisement translation, such as inappropriate choice of words, the confusion of word order and so on. So this thesis will put the advertisement translation research on the basis of semiotics, from the following aspects:the application of syntactics, semantics, pragmatics and the unity relations among them, to analyze how to make proper transformation between different languages, thus, readers can get a more clear understanding about that advertisement information which is conveyed through the combination of signs, and a good application of behavioristic semiotic theory in advertisement translation would give full play to the functions of advertisements in sales promotion.This thesis is based on Morris's behavioristic semiotics, and adopts the methods of literature retrieval and a combination of theory and examples, mainly studying the application of syntactics, semantics, pragmatics and the unity relations among them in advertisement translation. The research findings on the application of behavioristic semiotic theory in advertisement translation are summarized in the following four aspects:(1) at syntactic level, when dealing with the advertisement translation, the phonetics, numbers, gender and word order should be taken into consideration, thus to avoid the confusion of languages and sentences, which aims to reach a better translation and make the translation more accurate; (2) at semantic level, in order to highlight the outstanding characters of products, it is necessary to think about the usage of sings from word level, sentence level and text level, thus the advertisement translation can make the the characters of products more attractive; (3) at pragmatic level, with analysis of the speech act theory, conversational implicature and context can reduce the frequency of pragalinguistic failure and sociapragmatic failure, which help to exhibit the intention of original ads; (4) the unity relations among these three aspects also exert a significant influence in advertisement translation, that is to let the advertisement translation more appropriate to the expression of target language. The application of above four parts will make the advertisement translation more clear and effective to meet the requirements of consumers.According to these analyses, it is naturally to get a conclusion:the application of semiotic theory can make the advertisement translation better, reflect the original intention of ads more effectively, meet the consumers'needs and finally realize the best promotion of ads.