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Advertising translation is a cross-cultural communication. Cultural differences have a significant impact on advertising translation. In fact it can be said that a certain cultural tradition, belief and value largely affect the commercial operators and consumers’ psychology and behavior, and then affect the national advertising campaign. Successful advertising translation will bring huge economic benefits; on the contrary, unsuccessful advertising translation will not only bring economic loss to companies and countries, but also affect its image. It can be seen that cultural differences have a real impact on advertising translation. Cultural factor has always been an unavoidable problem. This paper collects abundant advertising translation examples to analyze and discuss the differences and the impact on advertising translation between Chinese and western culture.
2. Literature Review
Nowadays, advertising translation has played an increasing important role in introducing the products and promoting the sales abroad. Advertising translation involves many factors, such as linguistic rules, cultures, consumption mentality and so on. Therefore, advertising translation can’t be a simply mechanical translation activity. When it comes to the study on advertising translation, it is very necessary for us to have an overall view on the current research and understand it more deeply. Domestic and foreign scholars did a lot of important research on advertising translation.
Western study on advertising translation started in 1972. Hurbin’s article Peut-on traduire la langue de la publice first mentioned advertising translation in his studies. His study reflects the value of advertising translation studies. Over the next twenty years, there was a big change in translation studies (Nida, 1993). Scholars began to concern about functionalism rather than equivalence. However, this period still lacked some evidence of the research. Since 1995, there have been more and more studies carried out in the advertising translation. Guidere’s book Translating Ads describes the interaction between advertising and translation in the era of globalization. Besides this, in 2001, Sperber and Wilson developed relevance theory in the book Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Moreover, Verschueren’s adaptation theory also has a powerful explanation to advertising translation.
Domestic scholars began to study on advertising translation in the early 1990s. This stage is mainly about the study on advertising translation problems and the specific advertising language translation. For example, Fan Yanbo points out the problems in translating brand names from Chinese into English. Li Xiangde talks about how to translate the four-character phrases in advertising translation work. Liu Xinlin points out that commercial advertising translation often have some problems and do not meet the conditions in China. The next stage involves advertising translation principles and standards. During this period scholars and translators started to consider many aspects about advertising translation, such as the beauty of the advertising language, the consumers’ psychology and so on. Jia Wenbo points out that advertising translation is different from other translation. It is not only for people to enjoy, more important is to draw people’s attention to the advertising goods, and stimulate people’s purchasing desire and behaviors. However, only a few do their researches with the guidance of translation theory. Until the 21th century, many kinds of western translation theories are introduced to our country and there’s a cultural-turn in translation studies. Shi Yeli points out that advertising translation is related to the basic concepts of functional equivalence. He Shuang tries to deal with the cultural differences in advertising translation by using the principle of dynamic equivalence.