论广告语的翻译的原则

7. Classification of Advertising

The word "advertising" is often preceded by an adjective that indicates the kind of advertising being discussed. Advertising can be classified by four main criteria: target audience, geographic area, medium, and purpose. These classifications are showed as follows(Tanaka, K., 1994):

By Target audience

Consumer Advertising

Business Advertising

Professional Advertising

Trade Advertising

Agricultural Advertising

By Geographic Areas

International Advertising

National Advertising

Regional Advertising

Local Advertising

By Medium

Print Advertising

Newspaper

Magazine

Broadcast Advertising

Television

Radio

Out-of- home Advertising

Outdoor (billboard)

Transit

Direct-mail Advertising

By Purpose

Product Advertising

Non-product Advertising

Commercial Advertising’

Non-commercial Advertising

Action Advertising

A wareness Advertising

Advertising takes many forms, but in most of them language is of crucial importance. It is the primary vehicle for presenting messages to consumers; it is one of the tools advertisers use to attract the target audience's attention; it is crucial to the reasoning process by means of which consumers come to yield to advertisers' messages; and it plays an important role in facilitating the consumer's memory of the desirability of the product or service being promoted. Here, the thesis will restrict its discussion to the English language.

Language is used by people to convey information, to communicate ideas and, in a word, to carry out social communication. This verbal communication is achieved in given situations, in particular ways, with certain people and for some specific purposes. Different communicative situations, ways, target audiences and purposes call for different choices of diction and expressions of language. This leads to different varieties of language. The variety motivated by a certain function is called "style". English for advertising, thus, falls into this category.

2. Overall Features of English for Advertising

Advertising language belongs to "loaded language", which has strong "persuasive power" (Geis, Michael L., 1982). Its primary aim is to attract our attention and dispose us favorably towards the product or service on sale. Advertisers use language quite distinctively: there are certainly advantages in making bizarre and controversial statements in unusual ways as well as communicating with people using simple, straightforward language. According to G .Leech (1996), in order to serve the functions of advertising, the language must have attention value, memory value, readability and selling power. To be more precise, it is attractive, interesting, memorable and persuasive.

3. The Principle of AIMA (Attention, Interest, Memory, Action)

As is known, most advertising language belongs to "loaded language" which aims to change the target audience's will, opinions, or attitudes (whether in the interests of the audience or not is a separate matter). Advertising differs from other types of loaded language (such as political journalism and religious oratory) in having a very precise material goal. Changing the mental disposition of the audience is only important in so far as it leads to the desired kind of behavior）buying a particular kind of product. And in normal competitive conditions this means buying brand A rather than equivalent brands B,.C, or D. The goal could scarcely be more specific.

The most straightforward kind of advertisement is one which describes what special need the product fulfils, or what special advantage it offers. The trouble with this approach in a competitive market is that it tends to lead to a vicious circle of innovation, in which inordinate claims are made for the sake of "news value". Each advertiser tries to steal a march over his competitors by publicizing the most trivial change in his product as a vast improvement. In addition, for many products it is often difficult to think of any material quality which could be given as a reason for preferring one brand to another. Consequently, in recent years an alternative "brand-image" (Myers, Greg, 1994) approach, which aims to establish a stable market over a long period, has grown in importance. It is often more practicable to represent a product in a way which will identify it with popular desires than to persuade the public into liking it. Therefore, the selectional restrictions during the formation of the style-English for advertising-can be directly related to one of the four principles, namely, principle of attention, interest, memory and action. They can be considered under the respective headings of "attention value, readability (or listenability), memorability and selling power".