Creative Treason of English Advertisement Translation.doc

Creative Treason of English Advertisement Translation广告英语翻译的创造性叛逆1. Introduction The English word “advertising” originated from the Latin word “advertere”, which means “to give information to the public concerning,” “to draw attention to something” (Macquarie Dictionary 2003:13). American Market Association defined “advertise” “the non-personal communication of information, usually paid for and usually persuasive in nature, about products (goods and services) or ideas by identified sponsors through various media”.（Yin Lu, 2006:105）That is, advertise is to meet some special needs that people take some tactics to spread information of products to the public widely through various media. We can see that advertisement generally has a strong sense of function and purpose. The purpose of advertisement is not only to help the consumers know about the products, but also to tempt their sentiment, stimulate their purchasing desire and promote their buying the products. Its function can be concluded as follows: Information, Persuasion, Maintenance of Demand, Creating Mass Market, and Quality (Yang Wei, 2006:108).With the development of international labor division and economic globalization, the international products circulation goes frequently. In order to gain more market share on global market, every country promotes their domestic products actively. One of the most important promotion approaches they use is to present their products and win the global reputation through advertisement. The advertisement language is a very special and extremely important form of international advertisement. It would gain a business the global reputation with products exchanges, and become the invisible assets and fortune of the enterprise. A successful advertisement is the first step to broaden and occupy the tight product market. So, successful advertisement translation is an important marketing strategy to promote domestic products and occupy the global market. Knowing the characteristics and skills of advertisement translation with no doubt will lead to successful translation and marketing. However, in the Chinese speaking environment, how to realize the purpose and function of the original English advertisement through translation integrally, and fully deliver the effect of the original advertisement, even better the effect through creative treason of translation based on the target language is an interesting difficulty in the field of advertising translation. This is also the topic of this thesis to study.2. Creative treason2.1 ConceptCreative treason, a kind of re-creative translation, means to break away from the translation category and to rebuild a completely new one. Under the creative translation principle, the translated text always has a sense of creativity (Huang Yuchi, 2006:124). Translator can just break the rule that the translated version should be equal to the original text in the meaning of words, phrases and the style, and use the skills with flexibility, which means the translator “create a complete new translated version on the linguistic level”(Sun Zhili, 2002:137). Of course, we should not abuse using the creative treason principle when doing translation. The translation must be a re-creative activity on the basis of the original text. Sometimes, though its content is not equal to the original text, which is the treason to the words, it must be loyal to the original one on the spirit, purpose and function that the original text wants to express. For the peculiarity of English advertisement translation, the creative treason tactic is widely used.2.2 The formation of creative treasonIn order to gain the best translation effect and transmit the function and purpose of the original text fully, the advertisement translators always have no way to deal with the original advertisement directly, but use the creative treason tactics to translate (Apart from the re-creation by the translator subjectively). This translation obstacle forms mainly because of the uniqueness of advertisement language, the great difference between Chinese culture and western culture, and marketing purpose of advertisement.2.2.1 The uniqueness of advertisement language Because of the commercial advertisements unique characteristics of function and purpose, the created advertisement language must be “eye-catching” and “ear-catching”. The language should be fascinating and has a strong persuasive power as well as presentation of art. Only in these cases, the readers or the audiences can identify and sympathize with the information, sentiment and even the taste of the advertisement.Thus, advertisement language always has the characteristics as follows:() The diction is brief and plain, usually composed by one or several short sentences or phrasesIn English advertisement text, advertisement language usually omits the subjective and predicate or other parts of a clause for the brief expression. As a result, it brings difficulty to the translator to grasp and translate the original text. For example, Adidas, the world famous sport brand, presented its latest advertisement “NO BROTHER, NO BASKETBALL” last year. This sentence is a very common expression in English, and easy to be understood by readers. But if it is asked to translate into Chinese, problems come. Chinese has the equal expression to it, such as “没有你便没有我”. But if it is translated in this way, the corresponding translation will lose the peculiarity of being brief, the sense of beauty and the power of persuasiveness in the original advertisement.()More colloquial words and idioms usedMany simple colloquial expressions usually appear in English advertisement language. They are not difficult to understand and are easy to translate into the Chinese of correspondence. But in Chinese we are used to using expressions with slogans or pursuing the sense of beauty of Chinese language. The colloquial expressions can scarcely attract the attention of readers whose mother tongue is Chinese. For example, one of the advertisement of Siemens is “We are Siemens, we can do that.” If translated directly, it will be “我们是西门子，我们能办到” It is less motive than the China Mobiles “我能，无限可能” , which expresses nearly the same brand spirit.() A large amount of rhetoric adopted As a kind of commercial language, the purpose of advertisement is to tempt imagination, inspire the sentiment and arouse the desire to purchase so as to sell the products well. In order to condense the exact theme and the inside meaning into a short advertisement text, the translator must adopt different rhetoric to design the expression and make its clause brief, fun and intensely interesting. Therefore, much rhetoric like metaphor, equivoque, rhyme and echoic are used. For example, “Goldlion is the tie of feeling” (An ad. for Goldlion tie); “From chips to ships” (An ad. for Hyundai Business Group).The difficulty of advertisement translation lies on that the translation not only is required to spread the information and sentiment exactly, but also to keep the original rhetoric characters. Meanwhile, Chinese and English belong to different phylum. They have their own specification on grammar structure, pronunciation and phrase. Though both of them are used to adopting large amount of rhetoric, some original rhetoric are still lost and transfigured invisibly in the process of translation. As a result, it can hardly gain the original effects.It is the uniqueness of the advertisement language that leads to the difference of difficulty level between advertisement translation and translation of other subject. So it is hard for the translators to translate the original text straightly. Instead, they adopt creative tactics to deal with the original text, hoping the translated text with basic language could be understood and accepted by the readers.2.2.2 Cultural differenceTranslation not only is the transformation of different language symbols, but also communication of different cultures. Nida referred that for a real successful translator, to know well about the two cultural difference is more important than to well-handle two languages, because words can only be activated when used in its own cultural background. The concept of value, taste, thinking mode, sentiment and so on differs in orient and occident cultures. Cultural obstacles always force the translator to “revolt” the culture of original language according to the culture of target language when translating. Only in this way, the translation could get the expected effect in the country or area of target language.2.2.3 The marketing purpose of advertisementAs a commercial behavior, advertising creation has a strong purpose on commerce. Advertisement not only offers information of products to consumers, but also tempts their sentiment, arouses their desire and promotes their consumption so as to achieve the sales purpose. Therefore, in the English advertisement translation process, the translator should not consider the words only, but observe the purpose of advertisement language, meet the needs of marketing and deal with the original text flexibly. That is the so called creative treason.The 5P principle of marketing theoryproduct, price, place, promotion, power, is the key to the successful sale of an enterprises products. It is not hard to see that product is the sole factor of the 5 that is fixed. When the sales market expands from the native country to foreign countries, the products start facing different place (market), and the enterprise must change their primitive promotion approach and make the popular advertisement suit the local flavor and adapt to the culture and the taste of different countries. Then it will retain and extend the original (influential) power of products to achieve the purpose of sale in different markets. Only the localized advertisement which compiles the different cultural characters, lifestyle and economic situation of different countries or areas, can be accepted constantly by consumers.3. The theory and ways to advertisement translation3.1 The choice of translation strategyAs early as 1813, the German translation Friedrich Schleiermacher referred two ways to translate in one of his booksUnder die Verschiedenen Methodendes Uebersezens: one is that the translator do not make changes to the writers original version as much as possible, and just let the readers go and try to understand the writer; the other is that the translator do not translate the original text directly, while has his translated text to be easily understood by readers of target language. Those are the foreignizing method and the domesticating method that we often mention. The topic which one is the best way to be adopted in the process of translation has long been an argument among translators. However, in advertisement translation, different translators may adopt totally different methods to the same advertisement slogan because of the commercial purpose of advertisement.For example, the slogan of the famous sport brand Erke (鸿星尔克) is TO BE NO.1. If the brands target consumer group are the persons over 40 years old, the translator can adopt foreignizing method to translate it into “永保领先”or“永攀高峰”. Because this way of flexible handle will fit more to the psychology of the brands target market. It grasps the common recognition of the sense of value that one should struggle and keep working but stay modest. But in fact, Erke(鸿星尔克) mainly aims at the market which contains the young who like sports. This group has a strong desire to be ahead of others and can easily accept new things. They also can understand some simple English short sentences and phrases. So translators can adopt domesticating method and translate the slogan into “永争第一”or just leave the English slogan as it is for “TO BE NO.1”, which is good enough to publicize the brand to the young consumers.According to the instance mentioned above, we can conclude that: (1) the interaction of translation is determined by translation purposes. (2) the purpose changes with the consumer varies(Wang Jianhui, Hu Dongping, 2007). According to the 2 principle, translators can take any appropriate tactics in order to achieve different goals (Yin Xiaohong, 2006:171). This is Skopostheorie made by H.J.Vermeer, which laid the foundation to the Skopos theory, which provides an important theoretic principle for the realization of creative treason.3.2 Skopos theorySkopos theory considers translation as a complicated interactive behavior. The aim of translation is often determined after counsel between client and translator. It is the initiator or its agent who makes differences. They give explanation of time, place, situation, intermediary, aim as well as readers and function of translation. According to the specific translating requirement, the writers interactive intention and expectation to the translated texts function, along with social knowledge background, interactive need of readers and translation expectation, translator can determine any translating tactics, and does not have to care about the equality of translated text to the original text, for which would weaken the translated texts interactive function in the environment of target language. Therefore, with the guide of translation purpose, the translator can consider the relative factors comprehensively and then decide the most suitable method. Approaches, no matter metaphrase, free translation or quote from a secondary source, can be adopted by translators if which can realize the expected purpose well. Translator has leading effect in the whole process, for he “must grasp which strategy to use totally and how to finish the translation” (Zhong Weihe, Zhong Yu, 1999). Skopos theory queries the primitive theory that centers on original texts. It explains the action of translation from a brand new angle. “Faced at aiming system, it is a descriptive and standard combined theory.” (Zhang Nanfeng，2004：121). The main function of advertisement is to move the consumers so that they would buy the products. So the realistic standard of advertisement translation is that whether it is recognized and accepted by consumers who would buy the products finally. Now that skopos theory does not restrict the use of translation tactics and thinks highly of cultural custom and language characteristic of target language, it must be directive to advertisement translation from English to Chinese. Lets look at the following examples to know how to realize treason to original text to achieve the advertising expectation.Example 1： Original text：No Brother， No Basketball. (Adidas) Translated text：无兄弟，不篮球。 This advertisement translation is wired and definitely a wrong sentence. In Chinese , “不”usually combines with adjectives to form a phrase such as “不好”, or with verbs like “我不爱你”. It does not h