论文总字数：32223字

摘 要

日常生活中，人们可以通过互联网和传统媒体例如广播、电视和报纸接触到各式各样的广告。作为一种大众传媒方式，广告可以发布信息，推销产品，扩大市场。一则好的广告不仅向客户介绍产品的详细信息，还将引起他们的兴趣。因而，修辞手段总是用来增强广告的美感。随着全球经济的发展，许多外国品牌和产品出现在国人的眼前。英语广告中使用生动多样的修辞手段也，而双关语就是其中常见的一种。双关语能引起观众对产品的兴趣，鼓励他们消费。然而，这些生动、多样的修辞手段使翻译英语广告变得更为困难。作为知名的语用学理论，关联理论的强大解释力为翻译研究提供了一个很好的理论框架。本文首先简要介绍了双关语在英语广告中的应用和影响，然后，从关联理论的角度对英语广告中双关语的翻译策略进行了分析，旨在为英语广告双关语的翻译提出一个不同的视角，试图为双关语翻译的研究产生一些促进作用。

关键词：双关语翻译；英语广告；关联理论

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 1

2.1 A Brief Introduction of Puns in English Advertisements 1

2.2 An Introduction of Relevance Theory 2

2.3 A Historical Review on Translation of Puns in English Advertisements 4

3. An Analysis of Translation of Puns in English Advertisements from the Perspective of Relevance Theory 5

3.1 Explication 6

3.2 Corresponding 7

3.3 Recasting 8

3.4 Compensation 10

4. Conclusion 11

Works Cited 13

1. Introduction

With the development of global economy, more and more advertisers tend to use rhetorical devices to attract attention and interests of the public, and finally achieve the purpose of stimulating their desire of purchasing. Rhetorical devices commonly used in advertising English include metaphor, parody, parallelism, pun, and so on. Among all of them, puns are one of the most widely used rhetorical devices. As a difficulty in the advertising translation, pun translation is getting more and more attention gradually. In the past decade, translation researchers have studied the translation of puns in English advertisements from Functional Equivalence Theory, Teleology Theory, Adaptation Theory and Relevance Theory. Sperber and Wilson proposed Relevance Theory in 1986. It aims to explain the process of language communication and is the basis of cognitive pragmatics. Relevance Theory relates to the philosophy of language, cognitive psychology, communication, and so on. Relevance theory not only plays a role in the promotion of linguistic research, but also has the profound theoretical and practical significance in other areas like translation studies which is commonly accepted as interdisciplinary. From the perspective of Relevance Theory, this thesis attempts to analyze translation of puns in English advertisements rendered with diverse methods, hoping to promote the researches on translation of puns.

2. Literature Review

2.1 A Brief Introduction of Puns in English Advertisements

Puns are one of the commonly used rhetorical devices in English advertisements. Puns can attract the reader’s interest and curiosity and then stimulate them to buy products.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word “pun” as: “the use of the word to in a way as to suggest two or more words of the same or nearly the same sound with company’s meanings, so as to produce a humorous effect.” (Simpson amp; Weiner, 1989: 832) Generally speaking, puns fall into four categories: phonetic pun, semantic pun, grammatical pun and idiomatic pun. These four kinds will be explored to embody the application of puns in English advertisements.

Phonetic pun refers to a pun involving one word with its homophonic word. This type of pun is humorous and funny. For example: Have a nice trip, buy-buy. It’s an advertisement of a duty-free shop in a British airport. “Buy” is homophonic word of “bye”. So, the implied meaning of this advertisement is: Buy some gifts before coming. The Airport shop borrows a phonetic pun to eliminate the embarrassment, and meanwhile reminds passengers to buy some duty-free goods in a witty way. Semantic Pun refers to a pun with one word used twice or more times. For each time, the exact word has a different meaning. This kind of puns can create implicative and artistic conception and thus enhancing the effect of language. For example: Try our sweet corn, and you will smile from ear to ear. Version A: 品尝我们的甜玉米,你会笑得合不拢嘴。Version B：品尝我们的甜玉米,你会笑得合不拢嘴，吃了一穗又一穗。The word “ear” has two meanings. “Ear” can mean “ears” and also mean “wheat”. This advertisement makes good use of the double senses of the word, to intensify an impression that their corns are most delicious. Grammatical puns usually include omitted structure, words or phrases with double or multiple grammatical functions. For example: Which Lager can claim to be truly German? This can. It’s Lager beer advertisement. “Can” can be used as a modal verb, and equals to “may”, but when it’s used as a noun to answer the question, it refers to “tin”. Idiomatic Pun imitates familiar sayings or idioms to attract the attention of readers. For example: Guinness beer advertisement: My Goodness! My Guinness! “Guinness” has two meanings, one is“吉尼斯”, the other one is the beer brand. “My Goodness” is a familiar exclamatory sentence for Chinese. In the advertisement, the latter employs the structure of the familiar exclamatory sentence to arouse people’s curiosity about the word “Guinness” so that it gets easier to remember this product for readers.

2.2 An Introduction of Relevance Theory

In 1986, Sperber and Wilson firstly proposed the Relevance Theory in Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Relevance Theory has profound impacts on modern pragmatics research. It argues that human communication is an ostensive-inferential communication. “The communicator produces a stimulus which makes it mutually manifest to communicator and audience that the communicator intends, by means of this stimulus, to make manifest or more manifest to the audience a set of assumptions.”（Sperber amp; Wilson, 2001: 63） In the terms of Relevance Theory, the communication of language is a kind of purposeful and intentional activity. In the process of communication, the speaker provides an ostensive stimulus involving his or her informative intention and communicative intention. According to Blakemore, an ostensive stimulus is optimal relevance when it is relevant enough to be worth the audience’s efforts to process it. (Blakemore, 2002: 28) The task of the audience is making efforts to infer informative intention and communicative intention from the words of the speaker.

The context is an important factor of Relevance Theory. “The context is a psychological construct, a subset of the hearer’s assumptions about the world.”（Sperber amp; Wilson, 2001: 15） The context comprises a huge amount of varied information about science and technology, religion and cultural factors. The context is a part of the cognitive environment of a person. In the process of communication, the same context that speakers and hearers know is named as a mutual cognitive environment. In the process of communication, with the aid of mutual cognitive environment, the hearer can understand the speaker’s communicative intention. The core of Relevance Theory is the optimal relevance principle: Communicative behaviors of Human produce an optimal expectation. The audiences have to find optimal relevance between the discourse and context of the communicator in the cognitive environment of two sides. Through reasoning, the audience can infer the implied meaning of the context, so as to obtain contextual effects. Finally, achieve the goal of communication.

In 1991, Gutt firstly applied relevance theory into translation research. Gutt proposed Relevance-Theoretic Approach in: Translation and Relevance, Cognition and Context. Gutt made a serious attempt to work out a new theoretical paradigm. He regarded translation as a cognitive and inferential process and argued that the object of translation is how the processing faculties of the translator’s mind work. (Li Zhanxi, 2007: 23) His relevance-theoretic approach to translation has gained a place in the field of western translation studies. In the relevance-theoretic approach to translation, translation is an inferential process with the help of the dynamic context .The inference is based on the relevance. According to relevance-theoretic approach to translation, translation is a research on reasoning process of the brain mechanism, and not just on the semantic itself. Specifically, translation is a communication between the author, the readers and the translator, through the original and translation. Undoubtedly, the translator plays a role of bridge between the author and the readers. Firstly, the translator must perceive the communicative intention of the author through the original. Then, according to the potential context or cognitive environment of the readers, make the original information intention and the readers’ cognitive environment have enough relevance. To make the readers achieve contextual assumption and realize the communicative intention of the original. Relevance-theoretic approach to translation has opened up a new field of translation studies.

In 1994, Lin Kenan published “the relevance translation theory”. He was the first man to apply the relevance theory into the field of translation research in china. In 1997，He Ziran published The Pragmatics and English Learning in which he made a detail introduction to relevance theory and translation study. In 2001, Meng Jiangang published The relevance theory in interpretation of translation standards and discussed the standard of translation from the aspects of relevance theory. Strong explanatory power of relevance theory has provided a theoretical framework for translation studies. (Li Yin amp; Luo Xunming, 2004: 24） The above discussion is based on Gutt’s relevance-theoretic approach to translation, which contains the analysis of concepts of the translation and the interpretation and application of translation phenomena. With the mature development of relevance theory in China，translation practice based on relevance theory is gradually increasing. These translation practices involve the translation of subtitles, legal terminologies, literary classics, poetry and prose, and so on. Although relevance theory is not designed for translation, it provides a good theoretical framework for translation.

2.3 A Historical Review on Translation of Puns in English Advertisements

Pun has the characteristic of a phrase or a word with double meanings. How to make readers recognize the meaning consistent with the writer’s intention? This is the main task for the translator in the translation of a pun. Thus, the study on translation of puns is not simple for scholars. In recent years, domestic famous scholars actively engage in a serious study of this problem. They try to explore translation strategies of advertising puns from different perspectives. In 2008, Li Guoqing discussed the translation of advertising puns, based on Halliday"s view of Language Functions. In 2009, Chen Yi discussed translation strategies of advertising puns from the Teleology Theory. He thinks that the translator should play subjective initiative to create the original texts in the target language, in order to achieve persuading functions of pun in the target language (Chen Yi, 2010: 5). In the same year, Zhang Yashu discussed translation strategies of advertising puns, on the theoretical framework of Adaptation Theory. In general, they are trying to find appropriate translation methods or strategies of advertising puns from western translation theories. Nowadays, more scholars study on this subject by emulating predecessors’ methods and have made some achievements.

However, a few studies are on the theoretical framework of Relevance Theory. “Relevance theory is neither based on the rules, nor on the basis of criteria” (He Ziran, 1997: 55) but takes human cognition as a starting point. It regards the language as a communicative activity, and investigates the human understanding of the word. This paper will analyze the translation of puns in English advertisements with different strategies from the perspective of Relevance Theory.

3. An Analysis of Translation of Puns in English Advertisements from the Perspective of Relevance Theory

On the Relevance-Theoretic Approach to translation, the translation of puns can be seen as an ostensive-inferential activity which gives an interpretation of the original express. The whole process of translation comprises two ostensive-inferential processes, and involves three parties: the original author, the translator and the readers. The translation is a process of transforming the author’s communicative intention into the contextual assumptions of the readers. Therefore, the translator is the bridge between the author and the readers, and has double identities. Due to huge differences in language and culture between English and Chinese, sometimes, implied intention of puns can not be understood by readers. Translators should be aware of the readers’ cognitive environments and cultural backgrounds, and then make readers obtain the optimal relevance of information after reasoning in translation. Here are some methods applied in puns translation, showing the translator’s cognitive inferential communication process.

3.1 Explication

A pun has double meanings--literal meaning and implicit meaning. Explication means the translation conveys both ostensible meaning and implicit meanings of a pun by offering some necessary explanations.

Example 1: The unique spirit of Canada. (Liu Rongzheng, 2002: 76)

Version: 独一无二的加拿大酒，独一无二的加拿大精神。

This is an advertisement of whiskey. In this advertisement, the word “spirit” means two different things. One is “liquor”, and the other is “essential nature of a person”. In Chinese, it means“精神”. In the translation of a pun, the first ostensive-inferential process is the communication process between the advertiser and the translator. If the translator wants to translate the advertiser’s communicative intention, he or she must firstly understand the original text. The first meaning of the word “spirit” implies the beverage’s unique quality or flavor, while the second meaning serves as a compliment to the beverage, suggesting that it represents the characteristic of Canada, and hence it"s superior to others. Thus, the translator knows that the advertiser intends to show both of these two interpretations. How to make readers understand two interpretations? It’s the next task for the translator. However, considering the language differences, the translator can’t keep both of them in one word in Chinese. The translator therefore explicates the two meanings separately. In Chinese, the word “unique” means“独一无二”. Through repeating the two words“加拿大”and“独一无二”, the superiority and uniqueness of the beverage is highly emphasized. Here is another example of this kind.

Example 2：The self-made woman，She’s living better all the time.

Version A: 自我塑造的女性，总是有更好的生活。

Version B: 《自我》造就的女性，生活总是这么称心。

This is an advertisement of magazine Self. Version A shows the literal meaning that readers can easily understand. In Chinese, the word “self” refers to“自我”. At the same time, it is also the name of the magazine. Considering from the angle of the readers, they may seldom read women’s magazines or lack in information about this journal. It’s often very difficult to imagine this is a magazine advertisement for readers. “Self-made” means “self created”. In today’s society, the status of women has been greatly improved. Women are more independent, and have more and more strong self consciousness. “Self-made” shows that the magazine advocates women’s self-made life, to cater to the pursuit of self-improvement of women. After understanding the advertiser’s communication intention, the translator translate “self-made” as:《自我》造就. It not only retains the original meaning, but also allows readers to understand that the magazine has an invisible, formative influence on improving the process of women"s self-cultivation. The translator makes advertiser"s intention connect with reader"s context, so that readers spend less effort to obtain contextual effects.

3.2 Corresponding

The majority of English and Chinese idioms are based on certain cultural backgrounds. On the condition that source language has the cognitive environment and the language characteristics similar to those of the target language readers. Sometimes, the original language has fixed patterns and phrases corresponding to those in the target language. In the translation, these fixed patterns and phrases can guarantee the original simple, and convey the cultural connotation of the original.

For example: An Apple for everybody keeps worries away. (Zhao Changhan, 2005: 92)

Version A: 天天有苹果，烦恼远离我。

Version B: 电脑选苹果，烦恼远离我。

In this advertisement of a computer, the word “Apple” has two meanings. The literal meaning is “the fruit apple”. The implicit meaning is “the computer brand”. In general, the readers easily associate it with the western old saying “An apple a day keeps a doctor away”. The saying is often translated as“一天一个苹果，医生远离我”, which suggests people how to keep a healthy way of life. Gutt pointed out that “A translation would be receptor language text that interpretively resembles the original.”(Gutt, 2004: 105) the translation has to close with the original in relevant aspects. Version A is close to the original text but not fully conforms to advertiser’s communicative intention. So it should be abandoned. Guided by the principle of optimal relevance, the translator has to help the reader achieve contextual assumptions and recognize the intention of the advertiser. So the translator has to make readers see the word “apple” as the computer brand. At the same time, considering the reader’s cognitive environment, the translator knows that the saying “An apple a day keeps a doctor away” is familiar to the reader. So along this line of thinking, Version B conveys to the readers that Apple computer can bring healthy and happy life, and cleverly let readers remember the brand. Another example is analyzed in the following paragraphs.

For example: Start Ahead.

Version A：在前方开始。

Version B：成功之路，从“头”开始。

This is an advertisement of rejoice shampoo. “Ahead” means “in the front, ahead of time”. Version A is the literal meaning of the advertisement. From the sentence “从前方开始”, readers may be unable to obtain contextual assumptions relevant to the advertiser’s communicative intention, because“从前方开始” can be used in many commodity situation. However, it has little relation to washing materials. Version A cannot provide sufficient information for the readers. So, readers can not infer the communicative intention of the advertiser, on the basis of their own cognitive environment. Because the word “head” has the meaning of “in the front”, in Chinese, the meaning of the sentence“从头开始”is similar to Version A, and maximizes the reservation of the original meaning. In Chinese, the word“头”has two meanings, one is “the starting point of things”. Another meaning is “head”. The translator preferred to version B, because he or she considered that Chinese can easily understand“头”as “head”, thus bringing the readers into the advertiser’s expected situation. Because version A has little relation to washing materials, or can not attract the reader’s attention, the translator has to abandon it. In contrast, version B helps readers supplement the lack of contextual assumptions, and embodies the brand’s self-confidence to own commodities. Virtually, the readers feel that their goods are better than other commodities. Thus, it succeeded in stimulating the audience’s desire to consume.

3.3 Recasting

When the cognitive environment of the target language readers is quite different from that of the original author, the translator can reproduce a new pun in the target language to make readers achieve the similar contextual effects which can be provided by the original. Sometimes, if the translator can’t find a suitable pun in the target language to show both of the interpretations of the original, he has to sacrifice the form of pun to express the double meanings of the original pun.

Example 1: Better late than the late.

Version A: 迟到总比丧命好!

Version B: 晚了总比完了好!

This is a public-service advertisement of “safe driving”. At first sight, readers think of an idiom “Better late than never”, which is often translated as“迟到总比不到好”. In the advertisement, the first “late” means “delayed”, while the phrase “the late” means “the dead”. As a translator, he or she can achieve contextual effect by analyzing the original, and find the original author’s communicative intention. The literal translation of this public advertisement is“迟到总比丧命好”. This English advertisement borrows the structure of the idiom “better late than never”, whose translation shows human’s tolerance and concern. So the advertiser also hopes that this public-service advertisement not only warns people of the danger of fast or unsafe driving, but also shows the basic human concern. However, Version A can hardly make readers feel the human concern. Through further analysis, the author finds that the word “late” is used twice, so the original text is metrical. In Chinese, the words“完了”literally means “over ,finished or dead”, so“完了”can be equated with“丧命”. In Chinese, the word “late” can be translated as“晚”. The two words“晚了”and“完了”sound almost the same, they make up a new pun while realizing the similarity in pronunciation. Therefore, it is a corresponding pun that better keeps the characteristics of the original. Considering the reader’s cognitive environment, the reader can get enough contextual effects without expending their too much effort. The readers can easily remember this public-service advertisement and feel the human concern because of informal and euphemistic language. Here is another example of this method.

Example 2: Intel Inside

Version A: 内置因特尔处理器。

Version B: 给电脑一颗奔腾的“芯”。

This is an advertisement of a famous computer company that is well-known for its CPU chip. In the advertisement, the word “inside” has two meanings. One is “inner or internal”, and the other is “internal organ”. It’s a computer company advertisement, so the “internal organ” refers to CPU chip. Version A can show the literal meaning, but it can’t convey the communicative intention of the advertiser. At the same time, in the Version A, the translator can’t find a pun in Chinese to replace the original pun, so the translator recasts the source language advertisement. In Chinese, the word “芯”means “core or chip”, and sounds like “心”. As we know,“奔腾”is represented for the brand name and the its literal meaning is “a rapid pace” in Chinese. The translator uses two new puns in Chinese to recast the original. In Version B, the new puns make readers believe that computer with Intel Pentium inside has a rapid pace. By recasting, the translator not only reveals the double meanings of the original but brings about the contextual effects for the readers without spending unnecessary processing efforts.

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