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4.2.3 Cultural Equivalence 11
5 Strategies and Methods of Perfume Advertisement Translation 11
5.1 Literal Translation 12
5.2 Paraphrase Translation 13
5.3 Pun Translation 13
6 Conclusion 14
References 16
Advertisement Translation Under the Guidance of Functional Equivalence Theory——Taking Perfume as an Example.
1 Introduction
With the improvement of China's international status, advertisements can be seen in all areas of our life and are closely linked to our daily life. Advertising language, as the term suggests, is a way to promote and to express to the public the design value of the products and sales philosophy. Consequently, the translation of advertisements has gradually become a new research field that has gotten as lot of attention. In the age of globalization, many international brands put their businesses into the Chinese market, which means that the product will face the problem of localization. China's Luxury Market Research Report in 2012 pointed out that the world's perfume consumption per year reaches about 27 billion dollars. In China, perfume consumption also shows a strong growth trend. If the world's famous perfume brands want to successfully explore the Chinese market, they not only need to pay attention to improving the quality, but also have to concentrate on whether the culture conveyed by the original brand can be widely accepted by the target consumers. Therefore, it is significant to study the appropriate strategies to translate the advertisements of perfume under the guidance of functional equivalence theory.
This thesis analyzes the application of functional equivalence theory to the translation of perfume advertisements in terms of language, rhetoric and culture on the basis of Nida's functional equivalence theory, and concrete examples are provided to illustrate appropriate strategies in the process of translating perfume advertisement, making the translators exert their cultural advantages of the two languages to achieve the aim to promote and sell products. The innovation of the thesis lies in exploring the translation methods of the important luxury------perfume on the basis of the functional equivalence theory with the hope to improve the advertising translation’s quality.
2 Literature Review
Emphasizing the importance of advertisements is unnecessary, because they are an indispensable factor in the modern society, defining the meaning and the role of a product or service for us. A great number of scholars of translation, both domestic and abroad, have a variety of opinions on advertisement translation.
The first time that advertisement translation was mentioned is in Pierre Hurbin’s article Peut-on traduire la Langue de la Publicite–Can One Translate the Language of Advertising. In it, the notion of equivalence was primarily focused on the 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, 2000:121). Accordingly, in terms of any source text, there are quite a lot of translations. The translators’ assignments are to choose the most appropriate one.
Vestergaard and Schroder’s The Language of Advertising (1985) analyzes language use in advertising from the perspective of sociolinguistic. They expand the scope of the previous advertising studies to the discourse level and highlight several matters of the textual structures such as cohesion, coherence and information structure. They claim, “Advertising…does not try to tell us that we need its products as such, but rather than the products can help us obtain something else which we do feel that we need.”(Vestergaard and Schroder, 29)
Since 1995, studies about advertisement translation have increased with the emergence of global markets. Geoffrey N. Leech’s English in advertising: A Linguistic Study of Advertising in Great Britain(1996) is the most classic study on advertising language from a strictly linguistic point of view. This book provides a detailed analysis on the linguistic devices which are used by advertisers. The author describes the characteristics of advertising language by using a quantitative method rather than simply giving his impressions. He applies the linguistic theories of his time to probe into the features of advertising language after examining the motives behind advertising language as well as the cultural and social background.(Leech, 35)