On The Adaptation Of Cultural Context Of Advertisement Translation

Advertising, a forceful and effective means of sales promotion, serves as an unseparated branch of marketing and plays an important role in sales of products and services. With the acceleration of economic globalization, more and more manufacturers, at home as well as abroad, have taken part in competition worldwide and felt the urge of internationalizing their products and services so as to survive the fierce competition in the global market. Properly and ingeniously translated advertisements are accordingly called for by successful marketing than ever before. Called"the golden business card", advertisement translation is undoubtedly a crucial key to successful global marketing when multinational companies promote their products to various countries by means of glamorous advertisements in different languages.However, proper translation of advertisement is by no means an easy task for translators and international marketers with its complication and even intranslatability. Because different advertisements are heavily loaded with different cultures and hence tangible and influential to people pooling the same culture, advertisements, when introduced into another market with another culture, will inevitably encounter mines of culture and get trapped in the target market. Therefore, the discussion of advertisement translation from cultural aspects turns out to be a worthwhile attempt.This thesis, based on what is discussed above, is inclined to discuss the cultural adaptation in advertisement translation on the perspective of Adaptation Theory by using Verschueren's Adaptation Theory and E. A. Nida's categorization of culture. Guided by Verschueren's Adaptation Theory, the author contributes the majority of this thesis to the application of Verschueren's Adaptation Theory in advertisement translation, especially, the adaptation to cultural context of the receptor language.Within the framework of Adaptation Theory, especially the core of it--- the contextual correlates of adaptability, and based on Nida's categorization of culture, the author discusses problems mainly resulting from cultural factors and influencing advertisement translation and focuses on an adaptation translation to advertisement, specifically, adaptation to cultural context of the receptor language, which respectively consists of the adaptation to ecological, material, social, religious and linguistic culture on the perspective of adaptation to cultural context. The author wants to indicate that the translator of advertisements, in the process of translation, should lay more stress on the adaptation to the cultural context of the target language while the source language is given enough notice at the same time. In this way, the expectedly desirable effect of advertisements could be achieved as much as possible. And it is hoped that the study, by suggesting ways from a brand new respect to solve the problems advertisement translation often encounter, can shed light on the cross-cultural translation of advertisements, serve as a limited try in the application of the Adaptation Theory in advertisement translation and also provide some help to globalization strategies of advertisements of companies.