A Contrastive Analysis Of Intertextuality Of Parody In English And Chinese Advertisement

Advertisement as a commercial promotion means, its importance has been generally recognized around the world, especially in these days characterized with highly developed business civilization and globalization in economy. In order to achieve the best effect, advertisers should try their best to attract the maximum audiences in the shortest time and the smallest space. With the aid of wonderful words so that they can spread the information effectively and make it stay in people's mind firmly. Under this specific environment, parody, for its unique rhetorical effects, is so popular among advertisers that it becomes the"star"and"beloved"of advertising language.In this thesis, the author applies the concept of hypertextuality proposed by Genette in his intertextuality to analyze the examples of parody in English and Chinese advertising texts, so as to know the similarities and differences of parody advertisements of the two languages. The author hopes that this will give advertisers, especially the Chinese advertisers some suggestions and guidance to write and design advertising. According to the analysis of classifications and features of parody, the author can conclude that parody phrase, parody sentence and parody text are identical in both English and Chinese advertisements, but in parody word, the differences are obvious: English belongs to phonography, and its word motivation cannot compare to Chinese, but its modality motivation is stronger than Chinese. Because of its derivative and compound words, English has its unique parody word–—suffix parody word which does not exist in Chinese. And since Chinese is a tonal that due to its pitch of voice, parody words occur in Chinese language exclusively, such as homophonic parody word and sounding parody word (). These two kinds of parody words only exist in Chinese. The main advantage of English is its parody text, but it is weak in parody phrase and parody word. While Chinese parody frequently uses more phrases and words which are familiar to people, such as proverbs, idioms and popular sayings, but its parody text is used comparatively less. To sum up, whether the author analyzes these parody advertisements from classifications or features, the similarities of parody advertisements in the two languages outweigh the differences. Thus the feasibility of cross-reference and learning from each other of the two languages can be achieved.After comparing the features of parody of English and Chinese advertisements, the author applies intertextual theory to the advertising translation, and then points out the feasibility and availability of intertextuality on guiding advertising translation. The study and application about intertextual theory is significant in creativity and innovation of designing Chinese advertising. Chinese advertising industry starts very late and it is still at babbling stage now. It is necessary for the Chinese advertisers to learn from some excellent advertisements of other countries to keep pace with the development of Chinese advertising industry.