英语专业毕业论文（翻译方向）.doc

On Pragmatic Equivalence in Advertisement TranslationbyThesis Advisor: Submitted to the B. A. Committee in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Degree of Bachelor of Arts in the English Department of School of Foreign Languages of 10 May 2011本科生毕业论文题 目： 论广告翻译中的语用对等学生姓名： 指导教师： 二级学院： 外国语学院系 别： 英语系专 业： 英 语年 级： 学 号： 完成日期： 2011年5月10日Title: On Pragmatic Equivalence in Advertisement Translation Abstract: With the rapid development of international business and multinational corporations, there is a growing need for efficient international advertisement communication and translation. However, in China, advertisement translation is still an under-explored field, and the traditional equivalence theories seem increasingly inadequate to meet the needs in this aspect. That is because advertisement is a very practical type of writing with high commercial or social value, and all the advertisement materials have one thing in common, that is the essence of it is to persuade the target readers. Therefore, it is necessary to combine the typical purpose and translation theories in advertisement translation. As a breakthrough in the traditional equivalence theories and an important complement to translation studies, the theory of pragmatic equivalence has opened up a new perspective to the study of advertisement translation. Pragmatic equivalence, including pragmalinguistic equivalence and sociopragmatic equivalence. Under the guidance of pragmatic equivalence theory, this paper tries to analyze and explore some effective strategies with some examples in the realization of pragmatic equivalence in advertisement translation.Key words: advertisement; advertisement translation; pragmatic equivalence; pragmalinguistic equivalence; sociopragmatic equivalence题目：论广告翻译中的语用对等摘要：随着国际贸易和跨国公司的飞速发展，广告翻译在国际交流中的作用日益凸显。然而在中国广告翻译尚未得到充分的发展。传统的对等翻译理论已无法适应广告翻译的客观要求。因为广告文体是一种具有极高商业和社会价值的实用文体，它的本质目的是对其目标读者产生一种极大的说服力，因此在进行广告翻译时，必须把广告的特殊目的与翻译理论有机结合起来。作为对传统对等翻译理论的一个重大突破和翻译理论研究的重要补充，语用对等理论为广告翻译的理论研究与实践开辟了一个新的视角。语用对等理论包括语言语用对等和社交语用对等，在语用对等理论的指导下，本文结合实例分析探讨了实现广告翻译中语用对等原则的有效策略。 关键字：广告；广告翻译；语用对等；语用语言对等；社交语用对等ContentsI. Introduction.1II. Generalization of Advertisement.3A. The definition and purpose of advertisement.4B. Linguistic and cultural characteristics of English and Chinese advertisements41. Linguistic characteristics of advertisements.42. Cultural characteristics of English and Chinese advertisements.5III. Pragmatic EquivalenceA New Perspective in Advertisement Translation6A. The combination of pragmatic equivalence and advertisement translation.6B. Pragmalinqustic equivalence and sociopragmatic equivalence.6IV. Effective Strategies in the Realization of Pragmatic Equivalence.8A. Pragmalinguistic equivalence in advertisement translation.81. Proper transformation of pragmatic rules.82. Proper reproduction of pragmatic meanings.9B. Sociopragmatic equivalence in Advertisement.12 1. Correct conveyance of associative meanings.132. Correct target values and norms.14V. Conclusion.15Works Cited.16AcknowledgementsThis thesis would not have been completed without much generous assistance from the following mentioned persons, though the responsibility for its shortcomings rests with me alone.I would like to express my deepest gratitude and appreciation to my supervisor Ms. for her constant support, valuable ideas, great patience, encouragement, and guidance which has helped to write this thesis.I would also like to acknowledge all the teachers in the English Department of School of Foreign Languages of College for being a great source of enlightenment, and for making my learning experience pleasant and fruitful. They are Ms.g, Ms. , and so on. Im appreciative of the library staffs of College for their generous help and gracious contributions of materials.Besides, my special thanks go to my best friends and. My frequent discussions with them have brought me many bright ideas to this thesis.Finally, I would like to thank my mother and father, whose continuous love, support, and encouragement help me to go on, and fulfill my dreamI. IntroductionWith the ongoing globalization in the new century, advertisement plays an increasingly significant role in the development of the national economy and the world economy. Especially in China, with its entry into WTO; its holding of 2008 Olympic Games, and the holding of the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, more and more trading opportunities have been and will be offered to the country. China has been exporting more and more products and services to foreign countries.Therefore, to produce effective advertisements is undoubtedly of great importance. The production of an advertisement text involves considerable market research, so that the intended audience can be very carefully targeted. Researches on advertisement have been conducted mainly from some perspectives such as marketing, psychology, sociology and stylistics. But not much, on the other hand, has been done within translation studies about the complexities involved in the transfer of an advertisement message.Although advertisement language has its distinctive style, there exists no independent and fixed genre. Claiming a fixed advertisement genre is not convincing in the new century when things are subject to change everyday. However, what does exist is a model with persuasive intentions established prior to the advertisement language. In other words, advertisement language is harbored in the persuasive discourse; it is not a clear-cut genre, but the effects of persuasion have shaped its certain features.Resorting to the traditional concept of translation, emphasizing on faithful reproduction of the source text or the replacement of the material in one language by equivalent material in another language, advertisement translators have encountered a lot of problems in their translating practice. There have not been systematic or practical translation theories for advertisements so far. However, many scholars on advertisement translation have agreed on one important thing: what poses major obstacles for efficient translation is not only the language but primarily cross-cultural awareness (Thomas 91-95). Therefore, it is desirable that advertisement translation should be studied in a pragmatic way, which highlights the language use in different contexts and cultures.Besides, as the ultimate goal of an advertisement is to persuade people to take actions, the persuasive effectiveness in communication must involve the issues of pragmatics. Communication is only successful when audiences infer the speakers “meaning”. Otherwise, it will be meaningless if translators only analyze advertisement language without touching upon its goal and function.The general purpose of this paper is to study the advertisement translation from a pragmatic view. Under the guidance of the theory of pragmatic equivalence, a challenging translation theory aiming at reproducing the authors meanings as fully as possible, the paper will dig deep into the practical strategies in the realization of pragmatic equivalence from the two aspects of pragmalingustic and sociopragmatic equivalence. Hopefully it will shed some insights to the practice of advertisement translation.II. Generalization of the Advertisement The advertisement, as a very practical type of writing, has its own definition, functions and purposes. And advertisements produced by copywriters from different countries have their own distinctive characteristics. Being one of the key words in this paper, advertisement deserves a brief introduction before anything about advertisement translation is discussed in this paper. And a general knowledge of linguistic and cultural characteristics of advertising English and Chinese is necessary for studying the subject of translating advertisement between Chinese and English.A. The definition and purpose of the advertisement The definition of advertisement given by the American Marketing Association (AMA) is: Advertising is the non-personal communication of information usually paid for and usually persuasive in nature about products, services or ideas by identified sponsors through the various media (Bovver 89).The most important purpose of advertisement is to persuade the consumers to buy a specific product or service or to take actions beneficial to society (Geris 23). Therefore, it is reasonable to say that persuasiveness is the most important function of advertisement and the advertisement translation should also take this as the ultimate purpose.Advertisement has many components. Generally speaking, an advertisement is composed of two parts: visual and audio. The visual part consists of verbal elements including headline, body copy, slogan, and non-verbal elements like illustration, trade mark, band name, decorate border and white space, etc. And the audio part usually appears in radio, film, TV, video and slide advertisements.However, the current study will focus on the written form of various advertisements.B. Linguistic and cultural characteristics of English and Chinese advertisementsFrom the definition of advertisement, it is evident that the ultimate goal of it is to persuade the target audience to buy a certain product or accept a service. Thus, the first task is to make sure that the advertisement is attractive and easy to understand, so is the task of translators. The target audience prefers to accept the content and mode of expression in translation within the range of their knowledge. That is to say, the translation of advertisements must adapt to the target language style and target cultural concept. To achieve this goal, many studies in the field of the linguistic and cultural characteristics have been made. The following is a general review.1. Linguistic characteristics of advertisementsBoth English and Chinese advertisements have their own unique linguistic characteristics. The main linguistic features may be discussed from the following three levels: a. Linguistic characteristics on the lexical levelThe constant adoption of spoken or colloquial language is one of the main lexical features of both Chinese and English advertisements. In order to draw the audiences attention, an advertisement should be easy to understand and remember English translators usually use a large number of common words for the same persuasive purpose of all advertisements. The word such as “make, come, feel, love, get, go, take, taste, use” are frequently used (Leech 65). It is the same case in Chinese advertisements.The use of four-character compounds is a distinctive feature of Chinese advertisements as they can convey profound meanings with strong rhythm and rhyme in a very concise form. Different from Chinese advertisements, there are many coinages in English advertisements.b. Linguistic characteristics on the syntactic levelSimple and elliptical sentences are frequently used to make the advertisements easy to read, understand and reduce cost. Besides, imperative sentences are also employed for the persuasive purpose.Chinese advertisements usually use parallel sentences to give a deep impression on the readers or listeners minds, while English advertisements usually employ interrogative sentences.c. Linguistic characteristics on the stylistic levelRhetorical devices are very efficient means to assist both Chinese and English advertisements to achieve the special purpose. Generally speaking, English advertisements like using simple and concise words to express objectively one thing as it is, while Chinese advertisements often use modifiers, flowery words and comparative words to describe the products.2. Cultural characteristics of English and Chinese advertisementsAdvertisement translation not only deals with the linguistics aspect, but also culture. The following is a general review of the study on the differences of values and norms of English and Chinese cultures.a. Different values According to Dahl (118-32), a cultures values can be considered as the core of a culture. Values refer to the definition of what is good and bad. In the process of long-time development, different nations have formed their own value orientations on what are perceived as evil, good and neutral. In Chinese culture, identity is based on the social system and individual is emotionally dependent on organizations and institutions. Individualism orientation in China is considered as selfishness and looseness. However, in the view of Westerners, individual initiatives and achievements are stressed and pursuit of personality and freedom is highly valued and well appreciated.b. Different normsIn Dahls view, norms indicate “the shared sense of what is right and wrong” in basic meaning (47). In China, businessmen have long been regarded as unscrupulous merchants. The Chinese proverb “无商不奸”, is a reflection of this idea. Consumers are strongly influenced by this traditional view on merchants. In order to change this negative attitudes and build up good images of companies and products, Chinese advertisers would prefer to emphasize reputation in their designing and writing of advertisements, and expressions such as “质量第一,信誉第一”; “重合同,守信用” are frequently used. However, in Western countries those expressions may make consumers baffled and uninterested, since they take for granted that a company should abide by contract and credibility, and customers are the utmost in business. Therefore, those expressions are rarely seen in English advertisements.The above study presents clearly that both Chinese and English advertisements have their unique linguistic and cultural features. Thus, these features should be considered in advertisement translation.III. Pragmatic EquivalenceA New Perspective in Advertisement Translation As the advertisement has its own purpose, the traditional equivalence theory cannot meet the need of advertisement translation. It is necessary to study it from the perspective of pragmatic equivalence.A. The combination of pragmatic equivalence and advertisement translationIt is presented in the above text that advertisement is a special kind of language with special function of persuading and also has some linguistic and cultural differences between Chinese and English. Therefore, advertisement translation can be considered as a special kind of translation.In China, the advertisement translation studies haven not been well developed. The traditional Equivalence Theory focusing on linguistic and aesthetic cannot meet the need of advertisement translation, because both of them have their own special emphasis on different elements involved in translation, and contradict each other in many ways. Therefore, it calls for renewing how the advertisement translation is situated in the context of the communication situation and the culture by the employment of a new approach.Pragmatic equivalence probes into the nature of translation and the close relationship between language use and translation. From the two aspects of equivalence : pragmalinguistic equivalence and socopragmatic equivalence, it, on the one hand, pays enough attention to the translation process and the important role played by the ST, and, on the other hand, emphasizes the translators role and the effect of the TT on the target readers (House 94). B. Pragmalinguistic equivalence and sociopragmatic equivalenceAs to pragmalinguistic equivalence, translators do not rigidly adhere to the form of the original language at the lexical, grammatical and semantic level. On the contrary, they solely keep the content of the original language and attempt to achieve the equivalence by expressing the content through using the closest natural equivalent language in the translation. Pragmalinguistic equivalence emphasizes the correct understanding of the pragmatic force of the language form of the original, including grammar and lexicons. Pragmatics force is the intended meaning of a given message.The sociopragmatic equivalence refers to pragmatic studies which examine the conditions on language use that stem from the social and cultural situations. The equivalent effect of sociopragmatic translation can only be achieved when the translator uses his abundant social and cross-cultural knowledge to set up a correct conception of the different social situations on cultural backgrounds between the source language and the target language, representing one for the other appropriately. The translator should have a clear understanding of the social cultural background of both source and target languages, correctly understand the pragmatic function of the original in its culture and pay attention to the cognitive environment of the target readers so as to achieve sociopragmatic equivalence.Translators have dealt with pragmalinguisitic and sociopragmatic equivalence in translation. However, there are some practical problems and difficulties in the realization of the pragmatic equivalence in advertisement translation. Therefore, translators should try to explore and put forward some effective strategies to achieve pragmatic equivalence.IV. Effective Strategies in the Realization of Pragmatic Equivalence In the process of exploring effective strategies to achieve pragmatic equivalence, the author mainly makes efforts from the perspectives of pragmalinguistic equivalence and sociopragmatic equivalence.