Strategies Analysis Of English-Chinese Advertising Translation In The Perspective Of Memetics

With the accelerated development of globalization, it is particularly important for enterprises to promote commercial advertising all over the world. The author discovers that many advertising translators confront a problem that, in order to create an advertising translation with endurable transmission and strong persuasion, it is not only necessary to keep consistent content and style between the source text and the target text, but also essential to conform to local audiences'knowledge level, cultural practices, and to meet their psychological needs and to be creative as well. Only in that way, the advertising translation can be propagated frequently, continuously, faithfully and to be memorized by the consumers. Therefore, translators often resort to the strategy of adaptation in translation, introducing some linguistic elements of the target language in translation, and even some advertising translation deviates from or distorts the original meaning of the source text. It remains controversial among scholars to determine whether it is translation or not in nature when the deviation is large enough.Advertising stylistic analysis, translation strategies illustration, and functional equivalence of advertising translation are hot topics of advertising translation study recently. The author regards advertising translation as a special business text translation that attaches more importance to the transmission effect than the translation equivalence. Traditional translation strategies and principles are not universally applicable to advertising translation, and it demands its own principles, strategies and assessments. The author employed the meme theory to analyze horizontal and vertical transmission of advertising comprehensively which embraced the population of advertising transmission, imitation fidelity, transmission period, and retention effect. The meme theory, similar to the gene theory, concentrates on non-genetic information transmission, and it has powerful explanation in advertising study. When it comes to the advertising translation assessment, many different versions of the same advertising constitute a particular meme pool. The best version should be the one with the best transmission effect and the strongest meme which will prevail over other competitors, and become widely known and effective advertising. The thesis quoted a great deal of commercial advertising in various fields, illustrated how to create a successful advertising translation by combining strong meme with effective advertising and by using advertising translation strategies and assessments. The thesis concentrated on the advertising translation from English to Chinese, that is, the localization of foreign advertising in China. The author intended to analyze transmission effects of different versions in the perspective of local audience.To sum up, considering flexibility, adaptability, and popularization of advertising translation, the author applied Chesterman's memes of translation and Dawkins'strong meme, to demonstrate that strong meme's features could be introduced in the advertising translation through translation strategies to create a strong advertising translation meme that possesses the best transmission effect, to illustrate Chesterman's translation strategies (syntactic strategies, semantic strategies, pragmatic strategies) by plenty of advertising translation cases, and to summarize the referential translation assessments (error elimination assessment, motivation assessment, strategies assessment, audience response assessment), attempting to provide the advertising translation research with a new perspective and shed some light on the advertising translation practice.