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Later, parody, which slowly turned into a rhetorical device in English linguistics, and became a clever, witty, and interesting figure of speech. According to the needs of required expression, parody is used to create a new phrase, a new sentence or a new paragraph modeled on the well-known and off-the-shelf language materials, to make the language lively, sometimes ironic or mockery, sometimes humorous or witty. Correspondingly, in Chinese, there is also a kind of parody, which is defined as “an ingenious rhetorical device, used on purpose to satire or mock something based on imitating a unique existing form” (Chen, 1979). Chinese parody generally models on those famous idioms, proverbs, sayings and aphorisms. But, actually, Chen’s definition of parody is not entirely correct from now on.
Nowadays, parody has developed into a new kind of translation strategy and has been heatedly discussed in ad translation field. According to the principle of parody translation, translators should deliver the intention or inference to readers. To use the best related language towards readers, advertisers will achieve the best advertising effect in the target language, the principles of which are innovative ideas, persity of meaning, emotional force, and stylistic effect. (Chen and Zhao, 2009)
What’s more, regarded as an effective strategy of ad translation, the natural operation of parody is consistent with the new translation theory, memetics, so-called the transmission of linguistic memes. Therefore, to further demonstrate the relation of parody and memetics, definition and origin of memetics would be listed in the following part.
3.2 Definition and Origin of Memetics
In 1976, Richard Dawkins, an eminent Oxford zoologist, first coined the word “meme” in his best-selling book The Selfish Gene. At the end of the book, he radically proposes that biology is not the only field where evolution is at work; human culture also evolves and changes. Gene is the biological replicator, so by analogy, “meme” is the cultural replicator which drives the culture evolution.
Dawkins invents the word “meme” form the Greek “Mimeme” which means imitation, but shortens it to sound like “gene”. In this book, Dawkins further elaborates it as follows:
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, and ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leading from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. (Dawkins, 1976:206)
Also, Dawkins lists three criteria for any strong memes: (1) Fecundity: the faster the rate of copying is, the more the replicator will spread. (2) Copying-fidelity: the more faithful the copy is, the more will remain of the initial pattern after several rounds of copying. Fidelity here does not mean the prototype transmitted invariably, but means the essence of the original is handed down. (3) Longevity: the longer any instance of the replicating pattern survives, the more copies can be made of it.
Now the term “meme”, as the unit of cultural selection, has not only been added to the Oxford English Dictionary but also developed into a growing domain of studies called “memetics”. Memetics is a Neo-Darwinian approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the notion of the meme. It is an intellectually rich but controversial field which seeks to explain how our minds and cultures are designed by natural selection acting on replicating information, just as organisms evolve by natural selection acting on genes. However, proponents of memetics believe that memetics has the potential to be an important and promising analysis of culture using the framework of evolutionary concepts.