Newmark’s Communicative Translation:a Feasible Approach To The E-C Translation Of Automobile Advertisements

Automobile industry has been the most important sector in the manufacturing industry since the earlier time in the20th century. China has been the second largest automobiles consumption market only to US with a total number of about8,000,000since China’s entry into WTO. Nowadays automobiles become ubiquitous to people’s life largely owning to advertising. And few researchers give particular study on this field, so the thesis studies on the feasible approach to translation of automobile advertisements, which is practical to the Chinese automobile industry.Automobile advertisement is a kind of practical writing with a definite purpose. Translation theories must be closely combined with the special purpose of advertisement translation if the thesis is intended to probe into the auto-advertisement translation. Britain translation theorist, Peter Newmark has opened up a new perspective to the study of auto-ads translation. In the light of this theory, advertisement falls into the vocative text, which intends to call upon the readers to think, to feel and to act. This is the ultimate utilitarian purpose of advertisement. Newmark put forward two translation methods, the communicative translation attempts to produce on its readers an effect as close as possible to that obtained on the readers of the original, which is applicable to the translation practice of vocative text. Thus, this thesis will probe into the translation of automobile advertisements based on Newmark’s communicative translation.The thesis falls into three parts. The first chapter presents an analytical discussion about automobile advertisements and their translation with a focus on advertisement definition, its components, its classification, and the language features at lexical, syntactical, rhetorical and functional levels as well as the differences between English and Chinese advertisements.The second chapter introduces Newmarks’s communicative translation. According to his notion, the text can be divided into three types:the expressive text, the informative text and the vocative text. He definitely points out the advertisement falls into the vocative text which intends to call upon the readers to think, to feel and to react in the way intended by the text function and holds that the different text should be translated differently in terms of each function. He also suggests two translation methods, i.e. the semantic translation and the communicative translation. The latter, according to the author of this thesis, is very applicable to the translation of English advertisements because it attempts to produce on the readers an effect similar to that obtained by the readers of the original, which corresponds well to the effect of the advertisement translation.The third chapter, the main part of this thesis, analyzes the feasibility of the application of Newmark’s communication translation method to the automobile advertisements based on their text functions. By sorting out the ads functions into two kinds, namely, the informative function and the vocative function, the author points out that in translation practice the former focuses on information conveyance and language accuracy while the latter lays emphasis on emotional conveyance and sensational language. Then guided by the communicative translation notion, the author still points that the translator should correspond to TL’s stylistic conventions and consumption psychology of target consumers in the translation practice. Based on these analyses, the author recommends some translation techniques for automobile advertisements, including supplementation, condensation, creative rewriting, etc., under communicative translation. Furthermore, literal translation and transliteration under semantic translation are also recommended in this chapter, because few auto-ads can be translated well merely by communicative translation.On the basis of the above comparison and analysis, the author makes a conclusion that communicative translation is applicable to automobile advertisements translation.Advertisement translation plays an important role in China. It is sincerely hoped that the study in this thesis will be of some value to the translators of automobile advertisements.