On Ideological Manipulation In Advertisement Translation-from The Perspective Of Manipulation Theory

With the mushrooming and flourishing of joint venture companies and the fastdevelopment of multi-national business, there is a growing need for advertisement translation,which is the main communication tool between international companies. As a special specificbranch of translation, advertising translation has its uniqueness and its own rules andregulation, which deserves a systematic study and demands an empirical research.The traditional translation theories represented by equivalence-based translation theoriesare far from satisfactory when it comes to advertisement translation, because theequivalence-based theories too much emphasis on achieving formal equivalence between thesource language and the target language while ignore the communicative functions ofadvertisements, which are the major functions of advertisement translation. Manipulationtheory put forward by Lefevere sheds light on advertising translation. It emphasizes theachievement of optimal relevance in translation, which means the factors such as ideology,contextual effects and the cultural differences should be taken into consideration in order torealize the pragmatic effects.Lefevere’s manipulation theory has opened up a new perspective to translation,especially to advertisement translation. Lefevere insists that translation practice is a form oftext rewriting, and translation is a text rewrite to create another image in the form of text. Theprocess of translation will certainly be restricted by ideology, poetics, and the sponsor in thetarget text. Ideology, poetics and patronages are the "three elements". The most importantelement is ideology, which can be divided into individual ideology and social ideology. It islike an invisible hand to manipulate the whole process of translation practice.Advertising is a special literary form. The advertising translation involves the conversionof languages and also involves the transmission of cultural information. The advertisinglanguage itself includes a lot of cultural information, so advertising translation is essentially acultural phenomenon. In our translation practice, we have to cover two related languagesinevitably, including cultural information of the two languages, which is the so-called culturaldifference. Therefore, we have to master both the language knowledge, translation skills, the linguistic and cultural background, including the aesthetic perspective, the economy andsocial condition of the target language society.This thesis is based on the manipulation theory. The key point of this thesis is the studyof the manipulation theory of "three elements". By combining the ideological manipulation oftranslation with the process of advertising, this thesis stresses the important impact ofideology on advertising translation. This thesis claims that the translation activities aresubjective to ideology manipulation. In order to achieve the business achievement, thetranslators have to make flexible changes and compromises. Under the guidance ofmanipulation theory, this thesis analyzed cases of advertisement translation and attempt todiscuss the importance of ideological manipulation in advertisement translation activities.