Translation of Metaphors in English Advertisements from the Perspective of Relevance Theory开题报告

1. 研究目的与意义

With the economic globalization, English commercial advertising has been playing a more important role in international business affairs. It has been an important media for promoting sales,attracting customers, and exploiting the market. And a good advertisement can not be separated from excellent expression, and appropriate rhetorical methods. Metaphor, a common rhetorical method, effects greatly in advertising, which has also been investigated for a long time. Many scholars have made a deep study of the translation of metaphor and got achievements of different aspects, including metaphor in poetic, rhetoric, and literature and so on. They have also studied translation of metaphor in advertising. A proper translation of metaphor in English advertisements can help the related enterprise or company enlarge its fame,service, series of goods or brand influence to foreign customers. It could help to persuade the potential customers to pay close attention to the particular good services and expand the world market. With the fast development of science throughout the world, the country must take advantage of its own products to enter the world market,so as to expand its influence power. Not only the importing countries but also the exporting countries are all benefit from the proper advertisement translation. Relevance theory was first proposed by french philosopher Dan Sperber and the famous British linguist Deirdre Wilson in 1986 in their works Relevance: Communication and cognition. According to relevance theory, the human mind will instinctively react to an encoded message by considering information that is conceives to be relevant to the message. Relevance theory is a tool which helps the translator to achieve adequate and corresponding balance between source text and target text. Although there are papers applying the relevance theory to metaphor research, few of them touch upon metaphor translation in advertising. Being aware of the blank in research and interested in the subject, the thesis will focus on the translation of metaphor in English advertising within the framework of relevance theory.

2. 研究内容和预期目标

Research contents Based on analyzing advertisements, the special linguistic form of human verbal communication ,and the cognitive-based metaphorical theories, this thesis puts forward some concrete strategies of metaphor translation under the relevance theory. The author also attempts to give new explanation and analysis on translation of metaphors in English advertisements on the basis of relevance theory. Key Issues to be Resolved 1.the importance of metaphors in English advertisements 2.how relevance theory can guide translation of metaphors 3.methods of metaphor translation in English advertisements under the guidance of relevance theory Writing outline Abstract 1.Introduction 2. Advertisement and Metaphor 2.1 A general survey on advertisement 2.1.1 Definition of advertisement 2.1.2 Functions and language features of advertisement 2.2 A detailed investigation of Metaphor 2.2.1 Definition and development of metaphor 2.2.2 Classification of metaphor 2.2.3 Functions of metaphor in advertisement 2.3 The importance of metaphor in advertisement 3. Translating Metaphor in English advertisement 3.1 Metaphor translation: the key to advertising translation 3.2 Translation theory to be applied: relevance theory 3.2.1 Related concepts of relevance theory 3.2.2 Principles of relevance theory 3.2.3 Optimal relevance 3.3 Principles for translating metaphors in advertisements 4. Strategies for Metaphor Translation in English Advertisement 4.1 Metaphor to metaphor 4.1.1 Reproduction of the same image in the target language 4.1.2 Replacement of the image in the source language by a standard target language image 4.1.3 Same metaphor combined with sense 4.2 Metaphor to simile 4.2.1 Conversion of metaphor to simile retaining the image 4.2.2 Metaphor to simile combined with sense 4.3 Metaphor to non-metaphor 4.3.1 Conversion of metaphor to sense 4.3.2 Deletion 5. Conclusion

3. 国内外研究现状

Existing studies of translation of metaphors Dagut(1976) is the first one who brings metaphor into translation field in his thesis Can Metaphor be Translated. In this thesis, he indicates that there is no general rule for the translation of metaphor. Mason(1982) holds that metaphor translation has a close relationship with culture. He indicates that it is the cultural and semantic relevance shared by the target language speaker that determines the translatability of source language. Eugene Nida(1964) puts forward methods for metaphor translation as follows: metaphors to metaphors, metaphors to similes, metaphors to non-metaphors, and non-metaphors to metaphors. He adopts the above methods mainly from the aspect of semantics instead of the theory of relevance. Compared to the study of metaphor translation abroad, the study at home relatively falls behind. However, the study of metaphor translation has been developed in recent years. Wang Zuoliang indicates literal translation is the most effective method in metaphor translation because it can maintain the image and meaning at the utmost. Wan Bin does research on blending theory to elaborate translation under metaphoric structure. In his point of view, translation and dialogue or communication between source language and target language. There are sets of blending in translation. Existing studies of translation of advertisements Advertisement translation has experienced fast development through the appearance of international market. Translating Ads that written by Malhieu Guidere(2010) may be the unique publication which specialized about advertisement translation. He indicates the theories in advertisement translation including the aspects of culture and linguistics. Compared to the study abroad, the research of advertisement translation is relatively new in China. In the early 1990s, advertisement translation emerged and began to catch Chinese translators#8217; attention. As to the research content, primitive studies mainly concern the translation methods and the problems that exist during the advertisement translation. This stage is called the emerging stage. In the second stage, scholars paid more attention to the principles and standards of advertisement translation. Jiang Lei(1994) studies the equivalence of advertisement translation between Chinese and English, and he put forward his strategies. Then the in-depth stage, many scholars study it from wide range of fields including psychology, sociology, literary criticism etc. and various methods have been accepted in the study of this field. Li Kexing(2010) puts forward two strategies for advertisement translation which mainly focuses on the creativity and function of advertisements.

4. 计划与进度安排

The aim of this thesis is to find out how to translate metaphors in English advertisements to achieve the optimal relevance from the viewpoint of relevance, therefore, exploration and exemplification methods are applied in the thesis. Exploration method is adopted to describe the previous research about metaphors by some known scholars, the features, functions, significance of the advertisement and the related conceptions of relevance theory, which is the basic theoretical foundation of this thesis. Exemplification is another main method that applied in the thesis. Many famous English advertisement examples are selected to prove the author#8217;s viewpoints and also to ensure the validity and dependability. Most examples are mainly selected from books, magazines, newspapers, TV, and internet. In conclusion, the process of data analysis should be followed by the theory of relevance.

5. 参考文献

[1] brooke-rose, c. (1958). a grammar of metaphor. london: seckeramp;warburg [2] cameron, l amp; glow. (2001). researching and applying metaphor. shanghai: shanghai foreign language education press. [3] dagut, m.b. (1976). can metaphor be translated? london: malaby press [4] leech, g.n. (1996). english in advertising. london: longman [5] peter newmark. (2001). approaches to translation. shanghai: shanghai foreign language education press [6] wills, w. (2001). the science of translation-problems and methods. shanghai: shanghai foreign language education press [7] 束定芳，2002，《隐喻学研究》。

上海：上海外语教育出版社 [8] 徐小娟，2004，《广告英语》。

北京：首都经济贸易大学出版社 [9] 李克兴，2004，论广告翻译的策论，《中国翻译》，第四期，86-88页。