On Handling Linguistic And Cultural Peculiarities In Translating Advertisements

With the intensification of international business communications and promotion, advertising translation, as a type of intercultural communication, appears as a new field of study. It is more widespread in practice than immediately obvious. The purpose of this study is to give an insight into how to handle the linguistic and cultural peculiarities in translating advertisements from the perspectives of pragmatics and cultural compensation. International translation theories and practices have illustrated that the translated advertisement shall not be marked pragmatically as a target text of the source text, but instead shall be created in its own right. Thus efficient translator performance in advertising translation largely depends on the degree of adaptive strategy. Based on the previous studies and practices, this study develops a top-down translation model which claims that contextual comparison and cultural compensation act as the determinants in the decision making process of the translators. This study further points out that there are two layers in terms of cultural compensation: the linguistic layer and the ideological layer. Translators shall not only take into consideration the differences of cultural implications embedded in the language, but shall also bear in mind the differences in terms of advertising culture and ideology. We give a concise comparison of cultural orientations between Chinese advertisements and English advertisements, and analyze some bilingual advertisements which prove our argumentation that consumer orientations and cultural stereotypes constitute translation determinants, and they shall be valued above linguistic norms and conventions.