A Study Of Business Advertisement Translation-From The Perspective Of Memetics

With the highly developed business and economy,advertisements permeate every corner of the world,mirroring and influencing the evolution of culture and economy.Advertisement translation,hence,plays an indispensable role in sales promotion and cultural transmission in the course of cross-cultural communication.A good advertisement translation should conform to the requirements enshrined as advertisement translation standards,namely,attracting customer's attention,arousing customer's interest,provoking customer's buying desire and action.There is no denial that advertisement translation has been fully studied under the guidance of various translation theories.However,the study of advertisement translation should not restricted to traditional theories.Hence,the author strides a step towards the study of advertisement translation from a newly-emerged theory in sociobology---memetics.The present study combines memetics and advertisement translation,trying to demonstrate that memetics is conducive to the practice of advertisement translation from both academic analysis and practical illustration.Based on the meme life cycle theory suggested by Heylighen,namely,assimilation,retention,expression and transmission,the author probes into the inherent characteristics of meme transmission.It is found that the process of meme transmission is closely related and analogues to that of advertisement translation.Trying to combine the processes,the author builds a new model of concurrent processes of meme transmission and advertisement translation.Yet,a good advertisement translation takes a systematic guidance.Thus,based on Chesterman's translation memes,the author utilizes his norm theories and they are expectancy norm,accountability norm,communication norm and relation norm.Last but not least,the different transmission modes of genotype advertising memes and phenotype advertising memes are subject to research.And the author gets corresponding translation from the former and imitating translation from the latter.In terms of translation methods,corresponding translation is composed of borrowing the target memes and clarifying the original memes,while imitating translation includes grafting target memes,transplanting target memes and imitating target memes.Through the research,the author finds that the memetic process model and different types of advertising meme transmission indeed exert striking influence on advertisement translation.Advertisements attached with successful memes would greatly enhance their publicity effects.The present study,hopefully,would contribute to the cross-cultural exchange and advertisement translation.