More Enhanced Descriptions than Necessary: Transformations in Translating English Cosmetics Advertisements into Chinese文献综述

 2022-09-08 12:04:24

More Enhanced Descriptions than Necessary:

Transformations in Translating English Cosmetics Advertisements into Chinese

摘要：

What is advertising? According to Gillian Dyer, the author of Advertising as Communication (1982: 2) “the word advertising means rsquo;drawing attention to somethingrsquo;, or notifying or informing somebody of something.” One very important function of advertising is to communicate product information and create new demands. Nowadays, we are surrounded by different kinds of advertisements. Some products sold by transnational corporations may have many versions. They may be (1) totally different, (2) simply translate from one language to another, or (3) further polish the translation and add modifications to improve the literary beauty of the language.

With the deepening of reform and opening up and some other policies. There is increasing foreign goods in China in various areas. In this case, the advertisements of these products have at least 2 versions: (1) English and (2) Chinese. This paper will discuss about one major difference between the original English version and the translated Chinese version. Compared the English version with the Chinese version, we may find the Chinese version is over-descripted than the original English version. After making reference on various articles from cnki.cn as well as some books focusing on this topic, the writer is going to analyze the reason of this kind of transformation from 2 major aspects: 1, from the perspective of functional approach in translation. 2, from the perspective of vague language in translation.

According to functional approach, the source language (SL) is only an offer of information for the translator. Compared with the target language (TL), SL is not important at all. During the translational activity, the translator must make sure to fully understand and seriously consider about all the features and cultural factors of SL. At this time, culture is as important as language itself. In conclusion, SL is only the source of information, and TL is the key for the whole translational activity. The study of advertisement translation in China has gone through many years, and has formed many different strategies including literal translation, addition, abridgement, adaptation, free translation, etc. But whatever translation strategies is adopted, the translator should follow the principle are: target culture oriented and SL oriented.

Han (1998) considers that vague language can make expressions more concise, can increase efficiency and accuracy of the expression. Vague language faces the need of a piece of advertisement should be polite and implicit and euphemistic. A good advertisement need to let consumers think what they want them to think and finally complete transaction. So, fuzziness in advertisement is necessary, and that is its value in advertisement. Through analyzing some previous studies, the writer thinks that in EC translation, there have 4 kinds of fuzziness. a, fuzziness in pronunciation. In advertisements, the SL producer, the one who produced the original version of the advertisement copy, usually creates homophonic to achieve pun effects. Itrsquo;s one of the most common way of create fuzziness in advertisement copy. b, fuzziness in lexical meaning, which including 1, referential vagueness; 2, lack of specification; 3, indeterminacy of meaning; 4, disjunction. This is especially common in cosmetic advertisements, especially referential vagueness and lack of specification. And the writer will list all the examples accordingly in the following text. c, vagueness in grammar. Due to the features of Chinese grammar, Chinese sometimes can be much vague than English. So this is one of the major reason why the translated version (in Chinese) of a cosmetic advertisement is often over-descripted than the original version (in English). d, vagueness due to trans-cultural communication. English and Chinese are different as they belong to different language system, so there exist many differences in expression mode whether in words or sentences. Though vague language can add more literary charm in advertisement, but the abuse of vague language may mislead consumers, and consequently cause negative effects.

关键词：skopo theory；fuzziness；over-descripted；Advertisement translation

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