Advertising Translation

With the quick development of Chinese economy and accelerating globalization process, advertising business is growing at an incredible speed. China has become one of the top ten advertising giants in the world today. Advertising translation, as a type of intercultural communication and a new field of study, is receiving more attention than ever before. But as a matter of fact, in spite of the large amount of practices, the theoretical study on this new field is still relatively retardant in China. Among the current studies on this subject, most of them dug into the pros and cons of specific translation strategies, but failed to find out an overall guiding principle for the general advertising translation practice. The purpose of this study is to propose and prove Skopostheorie is the inherent guiding principle for advertising translation.Advertisement is a practical text style, quite different from common literary works, with a very material purpose to "address consumers' buying motives and to maintain existing attitudes and change negative and neutral attitudes to positive ones" (Duan, i997, p. 3). Skopostheorie, raised by Reiss and Vermeer in 1984, views translation from a different perspective and takes translation as an action and claims the success of a translation depends on whether it has achieved its purpose. The translator could flexibly use any translation strategy to reach the intended purpose. As advertising and advertising translation have an obvious purpose, Skopostheorie is just the right theory guiding advertising translation.This thesis consists of four chapters. The first chapter generally introduces the theoretical studies and practices on the subject of advertising translation as well as some general features of advertising. The second chapter illustrates Skopostheorie and analyzes the purposes of various kinds of advertising, and finally proposes the Skopostheorie be the natural guiding theory of advertising translation. The third chapter classifies various kinds of translation strategies into seven groups and through examples illustrates various strategies could be chosen to achieve the advertising'sintended Skopos. The last chapter draws a conclusion that as advertising is very special text style with obvious intended purpose, Skopostheorie is the most suitable guiding principle for advertising translation.