从功能对等探讨广告翻译的跨文化因素及其策略

作者简介：第一作者:王伟，郑州澍青医学高等专科学校 公共学科部外语教研室。

第二作者:金茹花，郑州澍青医学高等专科学校 公共学科部外语教研室。

摘 要：随着世界经济全球化的发展，世界各国的经济往来和商品流通更加频繁，各国要参与国际竞争就必须对产品的形象进行广告宣传。因此广告和广告翻译越来越显得重要。广告翻译面临的不单是语言转换问题，还涉及各国诸多的文化差异问题。本文针对广告英语的特点及类别，从不同方面分析了跨文化因素对广告翻译的影响，并结合了实例探讨了广告翻译的基本原则及方法。通过比较分析，在英语广告翻译研究上进行一些理论探讨,从而使广告翻译理论和实践有机结合起来。

关键词：语言；文化差异；广告翻译

中图分类号：H315.9文献标识码：A文章编号：1673-0992（2011）1-0242-02

Functional Equivalence and Its Application to Cross-cultureAdvertisement Translation

On Cross-culture Advertisement Translation

―From the perspective of Functional Equivalenceオオオオオ

Ⅰ Introduction

With the development of economic globalization in the world, the economic communication and the goods circulation between countries are more and more frequent. As our country joins the WTO and the further development of reform and opening-up, there are more and more products from abroad enter Chinese market, and there are also more and more Chinese companies wanting to make their products, services and brands enter world market. If a company wants to take part in international competition, it must publicize their products through advertisement, which makes cross-cultural advertisement plays more and more important role in our economic development. However, advertisement translation is not only language transform, but also involves dealing with many cultural differences between countries. This makes advertisement translation become a rather difficult and complicated work, and good translations of Chinese and English advertisements are urgently needed. Therefore, some theorists and translators have focused their research on advertisement and advertisement translation, and try to find suitable theories to guide advertisement translation. In this paper, the author believes that functional equivalence can be considered as the guiding principle in advertisement translation. This theory just complies with the characteristics of advertisement translation, that is, the target text should have the same persuasive function with the source text. This paper discusses how the translators deal with the different languages and cross-cultures between Chinese and English advertisement translation based on the functional equivalence theory, and then analyzes the common translation techniques.

Ⅱ.Features and Functions of Advertisement Language

2.1 The Features of Advertisement language

Language is the constituent of culture and the carrier of cultural information. Translation is also a kind of culture, the sub-culture that belongs to business culture. It has its own unique characters, which fully embodies the interrelation among language, culture and thought. Advertisement is a peculiar text. It always characterized by their definite purpose and functions. Therefore, advertisement language has its own unique characteristics.

The Features of Lexicons: In order to make advertisement easy to be understood and remembered, the lexicon of advertisement language is simple, most of lexicons are positive, and simple, short words are frequently appeared. In Chinese and English advertisement, we can often find monosyllabic verbs, such as following words: be, make, get, give, love, need, use, hear, see, keep, feel, find, choose, meet, etc. These monosyllabic verbs are not only concise and easy but strongly rhythmical as well. And most of them, as Leech (1966:154) points out, show a relationship between consumers and products. Here is an example: "I choose Bell because they still make them like they used to."Besides monosyllabic verbs, the use of adjectives, nouns and neologisms are also frequently used in advertisement. Such as these adjectives: good, perfect, special, easy, finest, quick, etc.

The Features of Syntactic: In advertisement language, the short sentences, affirmative sentences, imperatives, interrogatives, ellipsis are often used. For example, English advertisements often employ simple sentences and compound sentences of coordinate structure rather than complex sentences, and Chinese advertisements like to use simple sentences, parallel phrases, such as four-character words. These special sentences are applied in advertising to arouse readers' or audiences' impulse of consumption.

The Features of Rhetoric: Many rhetorical devices are widely used in advertisement language. Such as simile, analogy, personification, pun, repetition, rhyme, etc. we know, figure of speech is the most active factor in all the human languages. The biggest merit of rhetorical devices used in advertisement is to establish connection between abstract ideas or qualities of advertised product and easy-to understand ideas.

2.2 The Functions of Advertisement Language

There are many different views about the functions of advertisement, the commonly admitted one holds that modern advertisement bears four main functions:

(1) Informative function. Advertising itself can bring information of products and services to consumers, and make them aware of the commodities and services newly provided. Because of this function, ads have offered the consumers much opportunity to communicate with the outside world within their limited time and space. Furthermore, ads may influence the consumers to a certain degree of their attitude and behavior during the selection of goods or services. It is quite clear that the informative function of ads has directly or indirectly quickened circulation, enlarged sales, intensified competition, accelerated production and management, and linked up market conditions, in a word, has developed economy. Thereby, the informative function of advertising is one of the most important functions of all. (2) Persuasive function. The persuasive function of advertising means that advertising is playing a role of guiding and persuading the target audience while transmitting information. This function is also important in that the advertiser does not inform for the sake of improving his audience's knowledge of the world, but only to sell a product or service.

(3) Aesthetic function. At first thought, this function seems to be superfluous. But it is really true that this function is becoming increasingly necessary in modern advertisements. In a situation where it is technologically possible for more firms to produce largely identical products, it is advertisement's responsibility to persuade consumers to buy a specific commodity, thus advertisement nowadays needs to be more attractive and extraordinary, so the aesthetic function is necessary. (4) Emotive function. The emotive function of language is designed to alter the emotional state of receptors. In advertising, this function helps a lot to accomplish the technique of soft sell by appealing to love, reputation, humor, home comfort, patriotism and nationalism and so forth. Imagine that if an advertisement leads consumers to some good feeling, surely he or she would have interest in the product or service being advertised; consequently he or she may take action.

ⅢAnalysis of Functional equivalence in the cross-culture advertisement translation

3.1 The Basic Concepts of Functional Equivalence

Eugene Nida first proposed two different types of equivalence: “formal equivalence”, which focuses attention on the message itself, in both form and content. And "dynamic equivalence" which is concerned the dynamic relationship between receptor and message should be substantially the same as that which existed between the original receptor and the message. (Nida, 1964). In 1993, Nida changed the concept of "dynamic equivalence" into "functional equivalence", because the original name may be misunderstood by some people as referring only to something which have impact. The core concept of this theory is, dynamic equivalence is therefore to be fined in terms of the degree to which the receptors of the message in the receptor language respond to it in substantially the same manner as the receptors in the source language. (Nida, 1993:116) There has no translation ever completely equivalent. A number of different translations can in fact represent varying degrees of equivalence. This means that "equivalence" cannot be understood in its mathematical meaning of identity, but only in terms of proximity, i.e. on the basis of degrees of closeness to functional identity.

In other words, to achieve functional equivalence, the translator should base his translation on faithfulness in content and meanwhile use natural and expressive language to create a close style. And "the role of the translator is to facilitate the transfer of message, meaning and cultural elements from one language into another and create an equivalence response from the receivers" (Nida, 1964:13) Nida also articulates his concept of minimal and maximal translation. He regards equivalence as having various levels. Between minimal and maximal translation, there are many other levels of equivalence. (Nida, 1993:118)

Therefore, in cross-culture advertisement translation, in order to achieve that the target text should have the same persuasive function with the source text. According to the unique characteristics and functions of advertising language. Some translated advertisements can simply achieve the basic level of equivalence. However, some other advertisements do achieve more levels of equivalence. So from the perspective of Nida's functional equivalence, the successful advertisement translation should achieve functional equivalence at more levels. Such as the stylistic level, the semantic level, culture level and even aesthetic level.

3.2 The stylistic equivalence in advertisement translation

Stylistic analysis has many aspects concerning vocabulary, syntax, text structure and rhetoric and so on.

3.2.1Equivalence at Syntactic level

We have mentioned in the features of syntactic in partⅡ. No matter which syntactic characteristic of advertising language is applied, the copywriters and producers have only one aim, that is, to arouse consumers’ interest and stimulate them to purchase the product or service being advertised after watching or reading the advertisements. Therefore, translators must take these factors into account when transferring the ad. from one language into another. All that they should do is to try their best to keep the original syntactic structures under the condition of achieving the functional equivalence. For example, if the source text of this advertisement begins with a hook in the form of a question to raise the "problem" in the reader's mind. Having put forward the problem by a question, the advertisement goes on suggesting that the advertised product is the very answer. The target translation should retain the question-solution format, with the initial line of a question and expanding on the answer, therefore not only keeps the syntactic character of the original ad. but also attains the function of arousing consumers' appeal and stimulating them to act. From this point of view, we can say that the ad. translation is successful.

3.2.2 Equivalence at rhetoric level

Rhetorical devices also give expression to stylistic significance of advertisements. It is not difficult to see why advertisers should want to make their advertisements catch our attention. The whole purpose of copywriters is to get us to notice their advertisements either for purposes of immediate action or to make us have a more favorable idea about the advertised product or service. But increasingly, advertisements have to compete with each other and with all sorts of other texts since people have increasingly rich sources of information. So copywriters have to find various ways to shout at us from the page and rhetoric is one of the important strategies often used to capture readers' attention. Take a successful advertisement for example:

The original version:

Pepsi-Cola

Pepsi-Cola hits the spot.

Twelve as much for a nickel, too.

Twice full ounces, that's a lot.

Twice as much for a nickel, too.

Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you.

--Pepsi Cola

The Chinese version:

百事可乐美味迷人。

份量十二盎司，实实在在。

花上五分镍币能喝上两份。

百事可乐对你竭诚相待。

In this ad., rhyme, one of the rhetorical devices, is adopted. Rhyme is the repetition of ending sounds: technically, it is the similarity of all the last sounds of two words, from the ending of the last stressed syllable on. Rhyming makes an advertisement lively and appealing and rhymes help readers to remember it.

This Pepsi-Cola is in the format of a folk song, in which "spot" rhymes with "lot" and "too" rhymes with "you". The rhythm and rhythm make the reader responds to the form, even if he does not analyze it. It is part of the fascination of advertisements that they play with the form of language. The readers do not expect the last word of these lines to rhyme with that of the first line. This unexpected regularity achieves certain effect in the reader. The Chinese translation is still in the form of a folk song. Though the rhyme is different, the feature of rhyming is kept: "hai" shares the same ending with "lai" and "dai". Both the original advertisement and the translated one is successful in capturing the consumers' attention, and thus make it possible to stimulate an purchasing action of the potential consumer. Besides a functional equivalence achieved by the Chinese Pepsi copy, an approximation of style is reached as well.

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ThornNelsonPuliers

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