Translating English Advertisement Headlines: From The Perspective Of Discourse Analysis

As an important part of an advertising discourse, headline facilitates the realization of the contextual purpose of the whole advertisement. A good headline is believed to draw the consumer's attention in a short time, arouse their interest and entice them into buying. With China's entering into WTO and the opening up of its domestic market, more and more foreign products are rushing to China. Both manufacturers and advertisers are calling for good translation of their advertisement headlines so as to enhance their marketing competence. This calls for more works to be done on advertisement headline translation. Within the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Grammar, this thesis attempts to provide a tentative translation mode applicable and feasible to the translation of advertisement and other discourses, hoping to be helpful for both translators and learners in this field.This thesis carries out a tentative analysis on advertisement headlines in terms of language functions and contextual features, with special attention paid to the feasibility of changing such interpersonal grammatical resources like speech function and mood in translation so as to achieve a contextual equivalence, which is regarded as the highest standard for translation evaluation of different discourses.First of all, we have selected 40 headlines from magazines or newspapers with a big circulation both at home and abroad, such as Times, Reader's Digest, Newsweekly, Customer Home, etc. In the first part of our research, we analyze these headlines within the theoretical framework of the metafunctions, mainly focusing on the interpersonal realm. In the second part of our research, we concentrate on analyzing the feasibility of changing such interpersonal grammatical resources like speech function and mood in translation so as to achieve a contextual equivalence between the source headline and its translation. According to Halliday's account for the three metafunctions, we have found that ideational and interpersonal functions are the main functions served by the advertisement headline.Based on our analysis and translation practice, we have tentatively concluded that first, literal translation should be the translator's foremost consideration for translating different discourses, if it does not cause any cultural conflicts or interpretation difficulties for the target text receivers; second, the discoursal features and social functions of advertising discourse decide that free translation is a preferable way for advertisement headline translation, in which contextual equivalence is achieved at the cost of textual characteristics; third, the adoption of different speech function or mood in translation is believed to realize the contextual function of the source headline in a marked or unmarked way, which contributes to the realization of contextual equivalence between the source headline and its translation.