论文总字数：33904字

摘 要

本文以目的论为理论框架，研究商务广告翻译应遵循的翻译原则和方法。目的论是德国功能主义翻译理论中最有影响力的。它主张翻译目的决定翻译方法，并且强调了目的法则是广告翻译的首要原则，连贯法则和忠实法则是从属原则。在目的论三原则之外，作者又提出了创造性原则。

在目的论的基础上，作者运用描写法和例证法分析了广告的语言特点，通过对具体商务广告例子的分析，归纳出直译、意译、增译，缩译等翻译方法，进而得出目的论能积极有效的指导商务广告翻译。

关键词：商务广告；目的论；翻译原则；翻译方法

Contents

1. Introduction....................................................................................................1
2. Literature Review..........................................................................................1

3. Commercial Advertisement Translation.......................................................3

3.1 Definition and functions of advertisements....................................................3

3.2 Language features of Chinese and English advertisements............................4

4. Theoretical Framework: Skopos Theory......................................................6

4.1 Background and development of Skopos Theory...........................................6

4.2 Three rules of Skopos Theory.......................................................................8

4.3 The guidance of Skopos Theory to the advertisement translation................8

5. Commercial Advertisements Translation Based on Skopos Theory..........9

5.1 Translation principles in commercial advertisements translation...................9

5.2 Translation methods in commercial advertisements translation...................11

6. Conclusion.....................................................................................................13

Works Cited.......................................................................................................15

1. Introduction

Nowadays, advertisement has become an indispensable part of modern life. The purpose of commercial advertisement translation is to persuade consumers to purchase products. Moreover, many enterprises at home and abroad have realized the importance of advertisement translation and regarded it as an important part of marketing strategies. However, the quality of advertisement translation in many companies is not satisfactory. Because advertisement translation is a practical translation, and has been using literary translation theories, such as “faithfulness and elegance” and “functional equivalence”. These theories can guide advertisement translation to a certain extent, but they lack pertinence and practicality.

Under this background, it is very important to follow the proper translation theories and principles and adopt the appropriate translation methods to guide commercial advertisement translation. Commercial advertisement translation is not only a pursuit of semantic equivalence, but also a re-creation that highlights advertisement functions. In this sense, Skopos Theory breaks through the limitations of traditional translation theories, broadens the field of translation theory and provides a flexible theoretical basis for translators in translation practice.

2. Literature Review

The term of “advertisement translation” first appeared in 1972 in Pierre Hurbin’s article Can One Translate the Language of Advertising. Hurbin believes that it is responsible for translator to choose the most suitable translation among the many versions of advertisement translation. With his unique insight in advertising practice, he proves the necessity of studying advertisement translation. After two decades, Claude Tatilon’s article about advertisement translation was published in 1990. During these years, the focus of translation studies has changed from equivalence theory to functionalist theory. Tatilon’s article is based on Nida’s functional equivalence theory. He emphasizes the faithfulness of the source text and believes that a qualified translator should be faithful to the original author, target audiences, and translation initiator. In 2000, Mathieu Guidere shows the interaction between advertisement and its translation in this era of globalization in his book Translating Advertisements. He believes that there is equivalence between the source language and the target language, but this equivalence is not completely faithful to the source text.

In China, with regard to the research contents, in the early stage, scholars mainly focused on translation approaches of specific advertisement language and the problems existing in Chinese advertisement translation. Since then, with further studies, scholars began to study principles and standards of advertisement translation. In this stage, scholars began to care about varies aspects of advertisement translation, such as the text information, the aesthetic feeling of language and consumers’ psychology, etc. Furthermore, the researchers explained and insisted their own views, but didn’t agree on which was right.

Since the late 1990s, the discussion on translation principles and standards still continued. Meanwhile researchers began to study the difficulties in advertisement translation, such as rhetorical devices, conveyance of emotional factors, reappearance of brand image, preservation of trademark features and so on. However, in recent years, researchers began to make use of the theoretical achievements of pragmatics and other related theories to analyze various problems in advertisement translation, and then put forward some translation methods.

Li Kexing systematically combs and demonstrates the six common strategies of advertisement translation and constructs a theoretical model of advertisement translation. Huang Guowen is guided by the system-functional linguistics of Halliday, a famous English linguist. In this book, the author uses advertisement as the corpus to discuss discourse analysis.

Monographs devoted to translation techniques for advertisement style include Li Gang and Li Bing’s Business advertising English (2012); Guo Guilong and Zhang Hongbo’s English Advertisements: Style and Translation (2008). In Business advertising English (2012), authors select excellent advertising examples from the commercial advertising to elucidate the conceptual, phonological, lexical, syntactic and rhetorical features of business English advertisements. English Advertisements: Style and Translation (2008) mainly introduces the stylistic features of advertising English, language art and rhetoric art, and the translation methods and techniques of Chinese-English advertisements.

Chen Dongcheng"s Advertising Translation Studies from the Cultural Perspective(2012) defines the advertisement translation from the cross-cultural communication, emphasizes the subjectivity of translators, the communicative function, the cultural attribute and the purpose of the advertisement translation.

Although previous studies on advertisement translation achieves some success, there are some problems in previous studies. In the research of advertisement translation, the author finds that the majority of domestic scholars study on how to better translate English advertisements and they explore the corresponding standards and strategies of English advertisements translation. Studies on advertisement translation will inevitably use some successful advertisement translation cases. However, in the past three decades, some researchers have quoted the same translation examples, few new examples.

3. Commercial Advertisement Translation

3.1 Definition and functions of advertisements

The Committee on Definitions of the American Marketing Association defined advertisement as “Advertising is a non-personal presentation and promotion made by an identifiable advertiser to his ideas, products, or services through any payment method.”（Li Advertising 6）

Advertisement has broad sense and narrow sense. General advertisement includes economic and non-economic advertisement. The information of economic advertisement is about products or services,so it is also called commercial advertisement.

Commercial advertisements are for profit. Whatever the message is, the ultimate purpose is to make a profit for advertisers’ enterprises or individuals. On the one hand, the commercial advertisement has the commercial function of promoting the sales and guiding the consumption. On the other hand, it should serve the society and spread the thought, moral and cultural concept which is suitable for the social demands and the people’s mass interests, that is, it has the social and cultural function.

Advertisement also has other functions: informative function, aesthetic function, expressive function, vocative function. British and American Modern Advertising identify that the functions of advertisement are providing information, attracting consumers, maintaining demand, creating mass markets and guaranteeing quality.

3.2 Language features of Chinese and English advertisements

Advertisement translation should not only clearly convey commercial information, but also cater to the psychology of consumers and induce them to actively participate in business activities and purchase products. “It would be more accurate to argue in favor of an advertisement that is attractive, expressed in terms that respect the average level of taste and culture” (Reiss 39). Therefore, advertisement translation must be targeted so that the readers are willing to accept it.

1. Lexical features

Chinese and English advertisements differ a lot on vocabulary. Chinese advertisements usually use ancient poetic words, four-character phrase and fixed patterns. For example: 人靠衣装，美靠亮妆。（亮妆化妆品）不到万里长城非好汉，不吃全聚德烤鸭真遗憾。There are also some similarities between Chinese and English advertisements.

(1) Use colloquial words

Chinese and English advertisements usually use simple and common colloquial words. Because oral words are easy to understand and expressive and people will feel easy to accept. Therefore, advertisements will be widely known. For example:“ I couldn’t believe it! Until I tried it! I’m really impressed! You’ve gotta try it!I love it!” “牙好，胃口就好，身体倍儿棒，吃嘛嘛香。（牙膏广告）”

These two advertisements are almost full of colloquial words, like a customer who has used the product wants to convey the using experience to you, so it gives consumers a sense of reality.

1. Use evaluative adjectives

In order to beautify the products and attract customers, Chinese and English advertisements use a lot of evaluative adjectives with positive meanings or their comparative and superlative degree to enhance the charm of the advertisement. For example:

Philips Electronics: Let’s make things better.

Maxwell House Coffee: Good to the last drop.

良心品质，健康美食。（北京吉野家）

东方美食，奇妙感受。（四季饭店）

1. Use coinages and adverbs

Advertising English pursues novel, unique and eye-catching. Different from Chinese advertisements, English advertisements innovate spelling to enhance attractiveness. These words are not found in some dictionaries. For example:

Hi-Fun, Hi-Fashion, only from Sony.

Give a Timex to all , to all a good time.

The prefix “hi-” means the homophonic word “high”. Timex is a watch brand and neologism. It is composed by two words “time” and “excellent” and shows both the product attributes and the quality of the product.

Many advertisements also use adverbs with exaggerated meanings to obtain the predictive effect. For example: Motorola: Intelligence everywhere.

2. Syntactic features

Advertisement language also has its distinctive features in form. In general, advertisements should conform to KISS principle. That is “keep it short and sweet”. In order to achieve wonderful effect, the advertisement language attaches importance to the choice of sentence patterns.

1. Extensively use simple sentences.

Since the main purpose of commercial advertisements is to attract readers, the language is required to be easy to understand. In the society, it is very important that the performance and utility of the products or services can be presented to the reader in a simple and clear way, so that readers can be clearly understood and attracted. Therefore, commercial advertisements often use simple sentences. For example:

Mitsubishi Motors: Not all the cars are created equal.

Restaurant：好味道，才是真的好。

These two advertisements have a complete structure and highlight the high-quality of the car and delicious food of restaurant.

(2) Use imperative and interrogative sentences

In order to promote sales, advertisements in many cases use evocative language to enhance their persuasive function. The imperative structure can achieve this goal well. Interrogative sentence is also popular in commercial advertisement, because it enables consumers to think positively and leads consumers to pay attention to the body text of the advertisement. For example:

Ericsson: Hold it and you’re hooked.  
HSBC：Enrich your future harvest today.

Medicine: 保护嗓子，请用金嗓子喉宝！

Crown Royal: Tempted? Enjoy your quality responsibly?

Lenovo: 人类失去联想，世界将会怎样？

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