论文总字数：36008字

摘 要

随着中国经济的高速发展和全球经济一体化进程的加快，广告在我们现代生活中扮演着越来越重要的角色。然而，由于中英语言和文化的诸多差异，使得广告翻译成为了一项十分艰难的工作。广告的翻译不仅要准确传达原文的信息，更重要的是要达到吸引消费者消费的目的。奈达的对等理论注重译文的可读性，正好符合广告翻译这样的特点。鉴于此，本文认为奈达对等理论应作为广告翻译的指导原则，而且在广告翻译中，功能对等理论的运用可以达到三个层面的对等，即词汇对等，句法对等和修辞对等。本文，结合翻译中的一些实例研究，借助于奈达对等理论，探讨有关翻译策略。

关键词：广告；对等理论；广告翻译

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 2

3. A Brief Introduction to Advertising 3

3.1 Definition of advertising 3

3.2 Functions of advertising 4

3.3 Features of advertising 5

4. Nida’s Equivalence Theory 7

4.1 Formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence 8

4.2 Functional equivalence 8

4.3 Contributions and limitations of functional equivalence 9

5. Strategies for Advertisement Translation 10

5.1 Equivalence at lexical level 11

5.2 Equivalence at syntactic level 12

5.3 Equivalence at rhetoric level 13

6. Conclusion 14

Works Cited 15

1. Introduction

In contemporary society, advertising is ubiquitous in our daily life. We may come across different types of advertisements when we read newspapers or magazines, buy products in the supermarket and watch videos on the Internet. We can say that, without exaggeration, advertising has integrated into our life.

Since China joined in WTO, China"s trade industry, especially about import and export, has gained rapid increase. For this reason, foreign companies are not satisfied with the current situation and, for earning more money, want to enlarge the rate of their exported products in China, partly by using the most important and effective method—advertising. Also, advertising is a useful approach for presenting the cultures and customs of countries. However, inappropriate advertisement translation caused by different linguistic and cultural differences may bring some bad effects or influences on product promotion. Therefore, accurate advertising translation is of great significance in the promotion of products.

Advertising translation is not the same as that of literary works, for, as a practical style, advertising has a unique purpose of arousing consumers’ interest, satisfying their shopping needs, stimulating their desire of buying products and persuading them to take action. However, traditional translation theories are far from satisfactory and thus to achieve the above-mentioned goals, we should adopt another translation theory: Nida’s Equivalence Theory. Traditional translation theories fail to satisfy people’s needs mainly for two reasons. On one hand, a word-for-word translation approach can be found in many translated advertisements. These advertisements are strictly translated on the basis of the order and meaning of the original, regardless of different language features. On the other hand, because of the different languages and cultures between Chinese and English advertising, it is nearly impossible to find an absolute equivalence in these two kinds of advertisements. Traditional translation theories cannot function properly in advertising translation when people meet with some cultural obstacles. Therefore, under these circumstances, people naturally need a more practical theory and Nida’s equivalence theory is just the right and suitable one. Nida’s equivalence theory, unlike other traditional translation theories, is the best theory suitable for the exploration of advertising translation and this thesis will analyze some advertising cases in light of this theory.

The thesis consists of six parts. Part 1 is a general introduction to advertising and includes the structure of this thesis. Part 2, literature review, presents previous studies in the field of advertisement translation, including domestic and foreign research on equivalence theory. Part 3 discusses the definition, functions and features of advertising. Part 4 expounds Nida’s equivalence theory, including three equivalence: formal, dynamic and functional. Part 5 proposes some practical strategies for advertisement translation. The last part is a conclusion.

2. Literature Review

As times advances, many experts and translators from all over the world have studied and analyzed the translation of advertisements. Many theorists, like Nida, Tiber, Catford, Baker, Newmark and Wilss, have made much contribution to the interpretation of what the concept of equivalence is from different views and perspectives.

In western countries, advertising translation was first mentioned by Hurbin. At that period of time, the concept of equivalence became the main task in linguistic study of translation，which was “submitted to lexical，grammatical and stylistic analysis，it is established on the basis of text type and social function” (Venuti 121). Hurbin in his article Peut-on traduire la Langue de la Publicé( Can One Translate the Language of Advertising?), raised the question of whether the language of advertisements can be translated. At the same time, he held the idea that the translator’s main task was to choose the most suitable translation version during many types of translation for the source text. Almost 20 years later, there had been a shift of the focus of translation studies that Nida’s notion of functional equivalence replaced the linguistics and became the main concern of translation scholars. Claude Tatilon attached great importance to Nida’s equivalence theory. He figured out that the functional mode should not only lean heavily on the target text, but also keep its “faithfulness” to the source text. In his view, identifying function, laudatory function, ludic function and mnemonic function were the four basic functions of advertising. Until the 1990s, the research on advertising translation had made some advance. The book Translating Ads was the only published book about advertising translation. The intention of this book was to reveal the internal connection with advertising and translation. Mathieu Guidère, who was the author of this book, thought that the most important purpose of advertising translation was to promote the sales of products in another country or culture. Until now, many theories, such as Skopos Theory, Nida’s Equivalence Theory, Newmark’s Communicative Translation Theory, can be viewed as the guidance of advertising translation.

In China, studies on advertising translation were popular with scholars in last century. Before that, a very important principle came out and exerted an influence on advertising translation in China. In 1896, a Chinese distinguished translator Yan Fu proposed three principles of translation. They were faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance. Faithfulness means the translated text should be faithful to the original, that is to say, translation should fully and completely convey the thought and content of the original. Expressiveness means that the language of translation is fluent and smooth and the content is clear, not limited by the original form. It emphasizes the relationship between messages and receptors. Elegance refers to the choice of words in the translation should be appropriate and pursue the simplicity and elegance of the article itself. Afterwards, some other Chinese translators put forth other translation theories, such as Fu Lei “spiritual conformity”, Qian Zhongshu “sublimed adaptation”, Lu Xun “rather to be faithful than smooth”, etc. All of them are great translators and theorists in China .

Among these famous theories mentioned above, Nida"s equivalence theory can be viewed as the most suitable theory for advertising translation due to the particularity of advertising language.

3. A Brief Introduction to Advertising

3.1 Definition of advertising

Advertising, as a kind of human communication with unique functions, has existed for a long time. And in the meanwhile, the definition of advertising changes over time.

In English, the word “advertise” can be traced back to the Latin word “advertere”.Its original meaning is “to remind somebody of something”, “to pay attention to something”. At present, the various countries’ scholars on the interpretation of advertisements is literally different, but the basic meaning the same.

The American Marketing Association (AMA) defined it as “the non-personal communication of information usually paid for and usually persuasive in nature about products, services or ideas by identified sponsors through various media.”(William amp; Courtland 48)

From the above-mentioned definition, a conclusion that advertising is a kind of communication to deliver information by certain media can easily be drawn. It has the following components.（1）An advertisement is targeted at all consumers in the public, not individuals.（2）An ad conveys certain information and content that are relevant to products, and also can be about service. At the same time, advertising can also be used for people to propagandize some kinds of economic, political, religious and social ideas of non-business areas.（3）An advertisement distributes information through certain media, such as newspapers and videos. （4）Any advertisement is sponsored to achieve a certain purpose by particular person or organization, and most of advertisements obtain benefits by promoting the sales of goods or services, and of course people need to pay a certain amount of advertising expenses.

3.2 Functions of advertising

With respect to the advertising functions, there are many different views for scholars. But it is the four main functions that are commonly admitted in modern advertising.

First, Informative function. To some extent, advertising is the largest, fastest media of information transmission. Through advertisements, enterprises or companies can present some information about qualities, functions of products or services to consumers. Consumers can stay abreast of the latest commodity information through various channels even though they cannot go out or go to supermarket. In addition, through constantly advertising, consumers’ attitudes and emotions towards this product will also change subtly and silently. When they choose goods in the supermarket, they prefer to buy the product that is advertised.

Second, Persuasive function. Since the ultimate goal of advertisements is to guide people to buy something, persuasive function seems more important in regard to advertisers. From the point of view of consumers, advertisers tell consumers that this product is superior to other products through introducing this commodity’s merit and quality. Then advertisers gradually alter consumers’ views on products, thus making consumers preferable or favorable to the advertised products.

Third, Emotive function. The next important function of advertising is emotive function. Advertisers associate their products with some positive, pleasurable images and over time, consumers will transfer the positive emotions from these images to the advertised products. While advertisers deliver advertising information, consumers can hardly notice that they have begun to show interest in the advertised product and that they will be guided to accept some advantages of this product.

Fourth, Aesthetic function. Aesthetic function gradually becomes more and more important in advertising industry, though it was not taken seriously at first. More and more identical products are produced by various companies, which requires advertisements need to be more attractive, interesting and impressive so that consumers have a deep and aesthetic impression on advertising. Beautiful pictures, elegant sentences in advertisements can bring consumers shine at the moment and the visual experience of consumers gets tremendous satisfaction. Finally, consumers may take actions to buy some products for this satisfaction.

3.3 Features of advertising

An effective advertisement depends on that it shows the advantages of the product for consumers, differentiates its product from competition products, and gives a reliable and descriptive impression on consumers’ mind. So the language in advertisements is usually important. Each word in advertising composition has its distinct role to play.

3.3.1 Lexical feature

It is well known that advertisements usually show the utmost quality of products for the potential consumers by using beautiful, interesting languages. In creating advertisements, advertisers may create some new words intentionally to attract consumers’ attention by misspelling and coinage. For example, “衣名”惊人（一鸣惊人）is a creative advertisement about clothes. This advertisement vividly and directly describes the characteristic of the product and motivates the consumers to wonder more about the information of it. And maybe consumers are all curious about whether the quality of it is real or not so that they have potential motivation to have a try.

In advertisements, imitation and free compounding are two frequently used means to create new words and phrases. For example, “Come to our Fruice”. “Fruice” is abbreviated by two words “Fruit” and “Juice”. This coined word can easily grab people’s attention and make people memorable.

Second, flexible use of compound words in advertisements can not only realize the purpose of circulating information, but also enhance the expressive force of advertising language. Using compounds has become a distinctive feature in advertising language. By combining two or more separate words in one word, advertisers can quickly provide all the information needed by consumers. It is one of ways in which the advertising language is flexible and changing to promote products, as compound words allow people to create new words as the need arises. Similar words are “hard-working”, “home-made”, “best-selling”, “world-famous”, etc.

3.3.2 Syntactical feature

As for the syntactical feature in advertisements, it is not as same as that in other types of writing. In advertisements, advertisers often adopt the following sentence structures: simple sentences, imperative sentences and elliptical sentence. Simple sentences can make advertising suddenly grasp consumers’ attention and arouse their interests, while complex sentences are often boring and difficult to achieve the purpose of advertisements. For example: “Quality never goes out of style” (Levi’s), “The taste is great” (雀巢咖啡). These examples are extremely infectious and charismatic, with complete structure, condensed content and concise style.

Imperative sentence is another main type of advertising. Imperative sentence effectively proposes advice, request, invitation, command on different occasions. Imperative sentence is frequently used in advertising English, mainly because the persuasive function can directly motivate consumers" shopping desire, then maybe take some actions. For example, “Obey your thirst”. “服从你的渴望（雪碧）”. “Just do it (Nike运动鞋)”.

In elliptical sentences, the omission of a sentence can be any part as long as readers can understand it. In the limited time and space, elliptical sentence can achieve the purpose of saving cost on one hand and producing the best publicity effect on the other hand. Through omitting object, predicate or other components, an English advertisement seems more concise and shorter. Here are some examples: “Every time a good time(麦当劳)”, “Intel inside(英特尔)”, “The world’s local bank(汇丰银行)”.

3.3.3 Rhetorical feature

In order to leave a deep impression on consumers, advertisements attach great importance to the elegance of language and thus use a large number of rhetorical devices. Common rhetorical devices are personification, metaphor, pun, repetition, analogy, exaggeration. Personification endows the dead, rigid products with human characteristics. Verbs, adjectives, nouns, pronouns that are suitable for describing people are used to portray the characteristics of products, which makes readers feel more intimate. For example: “Your car knows (Amoca汽油广告)” “Time always follow me (罗西尼表)”. Repetition refers to the constant repeat of the same words and synonyms, so as to highlight the theme, express strong feelings and enhance the language rhythm. For example, “When you’re sipping Lipton, you’re sipping something special”. (啜饮立顿茶，品尝独特味 Lipton tea). In this advertisement, by reusing the grammatical structure “you’re sipping”, it highlights that Lipton is the “something special” and makes people hurry to taste it. According to the similarity of two things, one is replaced to describe the other, which can better describe or render characteristics of things. Metaphor is a figure to directly describe A as B, and the relationship between them and their similarities are implicit, so as to explain things more vividly and more profoundly. For example, “Toyota moves forwards as your partner (丰田汽车广告)”, “千里江铃一日还(江铃汽车广告)” “The new Jetta. It’s grown-up(捷达汽车广告)”.

4. Nida’s Equivalence Theory

Nida’s equivalence theory includes formal equivalence, dynamic equivalence and functional equivalence. Nida, together with these theories have cast a profound impact on studying advertisement translation and have guided various kinds of translation practice, not only in the U.S., but also in many other parts of the world.

4.1 Formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence

“There are fundamentally two different types of equivalence: one which may be called formal and another which is primarily dynamic.” (Nida 25) Formal and dynamic equivalence, put forward by Nida, are two approaches to research on advertisement translation.

Formal equivalence, as a word-for-word translation, keeps literal fidelity. It pays attention to the message itself including both form and content. In this theory, the translator is concerned with the equivalence between poetry and poetry, sentence and sentence, concept and concept. From the perspective of formal equivalence, translators try to keep consistency between the information in the receptor language and the different components in the source language as far as possible. This means that translators will continue to compare the information in the target culture with the information in the source culture in order to achieve the accurate standard. Gloss translation can well reflect this structure of formal equivalence, where translators try to reproduce the original content and form in a meaningful way based on the literal meaning. Such translation, accompanied by numerous footnotes, is to make readers understand the cultures and customs, thoughts and feelings of the original.

In a dynamic equivalence translation, translator’s attention shifts to the dynamic relationship. This dynamic relationship refers to that the relationship between target language receptor and information should be similar to that between the readers and the original. Dynamic equivalence emphasizes complete naturalness of expression and the equivalent response rather than form.

4.2 Functional equivalence

In the book From One Language to Another, Nida puts forward functional equivalence. At the same time, he explains, functional equivalence and dynamic equivalence are basically the same. Then he explains the reason in another book that the term “dynamic equivalence” has often be misunderstood by some people as it emphasizes the consistency of the content between the translation and the original takes precedence over the consistency of form. And functional equivalence refers to the outstanding translation communication function, which can clear up this misunderstanding. Functional equivalence requires that the translation and the original be equivalent both in content and form. Functional equivalence is that the relationship between the target language receptor and the target text should generally be equivalent to that between the source language receptor and the source text. Nida continues to improve his equivalence theory. He explains functional equivalence as “the closest natural equivalent of the source language”. Among them, “equivalent” refers to the source language information and “natural” points to the target language information, while “closest” combines the original with the translation on the basis of the maximum degree of approximation. However, functional equivalence has some limitations because translators will inevitably be influenced by languages and cultures when using functional equivalence to advertisement translation.

4.3 Contributions and limitations of functional equivalence

Nida, constantly absorbing all kinds of new research, modifies and perfects his theory to adapt to the rapid development of today"s translation theory. Many people highly praise this theory for its effectiveness. Every coin has two sides. Nida’s functional equivalence also has contributions and limitations.

剩余内容已隐藏，请支付后下载全文，论文总字数：36008字