Linguistic Features Of Automobile Advertising And Its Translation

Automobile industry has been the most important sector in the manufacturing industry since the earlier time in the 20th century. When the first "Ford Model T" was made in 1908, mass production has been introduced into the manufacturing industry. In order to take advantage of mass production there had to be mass markets, and that meant advertising. Nowadays automobiles become ubiquitous to people's life largely owing to advertising. In the United States, there were a huge amount of printed advertisements promoting cars from the 1920s to the 1960s, which was the "heyday of American print advertising." As is known, America is called "a nation on wheels." Among other factors such as advanced mass-production technology, convenient transport system, etc., auto advertising plays an unreplaceable role.In China, with the development of our socialist market economy since China's opening up to the outside world, advertising industry has been developing at a speed no one could imagine twenty years ago. Auto advertising, as an important branch in advertising, has developed rapidly in recent years along with the soaring of Chinese automobile market—especially the family-car market. Therefore, investigating the linguistic features of auto advertising and its translation is both practical and significant to the Chinese automobile industry as well as entertaining and informing to the common people.The thesis falls into two parts: Part I deals with the linguistic features of auto advertising, studying the features from the lexical, syntactical and discourse levels. In the end of part I we draw a conclusion: 1, A perfect auto advertisement is a team work; 2, The fusion is the major aim of contemporary auto advertising; 3, Factual claims and direct persuasion take up less and less space in contemporary ads. On the basis of Part I, Part II further explores the translation theories, translation strategies and some problems in the process of auto advertising translation. In the end of part II, we get the following results: Advertising translation, which is an important branch of advertising, is distinct from literary translation and other translation because of its specific commercial Skopos or purpose, which determines the supreme status of the target audience and the target culture.