剪纸艺术与中国传统文化的关系

浅析剪纸艺术与中国传统文化的关系

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南京邮电大学外国语学院

《学术论文写作》学期论文封面

姓名任婕

学号B11130529

专业英语

题目The Application and Translation of

Puns in Advertising English 任课教师丁小蕾

2014-2015学年第一学期

The Application and Translation of Puns in Advertising English Introduction

It is not rare that with the undergoing fierce competition of international commerce, advertising English has been regarded as an effective method of sale promotion. Advertising English is characterized by its simplicity, vitality and flexibility of language usage. As the advertisement can be seen everywhere, making the most impressed one is the main purpose of each advertiser. At present, puns are widely welcomed by most of the advertisers which strengthen the effect of advertising by adding more readabili ty and interests. Webster Dictionary defines puns as “the use of word in such a way to suggest two or more meanings or different associations, or the use of two or more words of the same or nearly same sound with different meanings, so as to produce humorous effects. Puns can satisfy the requirement of characteristics of the advertisement, which include information function, demand creation function, persuasive function, get action function and goodwill establishment function. However, puns are closely related to sound and form, which results in the difficulties in puns translation. According to the common application of puns in advertising English, they can be divided into four types so that it gets easier to master the strategies for dealing with the translation of puns in advertising English.

Literature Review

A number of studies indicate that translating strategies are crucial for the translation of puns in advertising English.

In “A New Concise Course in Linguistics for Students of English”, according to Paul Grace’s Cooperative Principle, puns in advertising English should avoid obscurity and ambiguity of expression (Dai Weidong, He Zhaoxiong, 2002). It shows that if the principle is violated, the translation will destroy the original meaning so that the communication between advertisers and target audiences will fail in the end.

Delabastita points out that when making decisions on how and to what extent to retain the wordplay, the translator needs to take into account the target audience’s

anticipated reaction in “Studies in Intercultural Communication 2 (2)” ( Delabastita, 1996). That is to say, it is significant to take into consideration the conventional thinking model of the target audience before starting to translate puns in advertising English, in order not to cause cross-cultural misunderstandings.

In The Varieties and Translation of English Puns, professor Xu Zhongbin proposes four specific strategies for translating puns: from pun to pun, making compensation, preserving one layer of meaning and adding notes (Xu Zhongbin, 1988).

To suit the particular features of advertising, the translations of texts should achieve “correspondence in meaning and similarity in function” under the guidelines of Nida’s functional equivalence theory in “The Theory and Practice of Translation” (Nida, Eugene A. 1969).

Outline

The thesis consists of six chapters. In the beginning, chapter one introduces the necessary background that puns has become popular in advertising English as an effective method of sale promotion, and stating the problem that there exists difficulties in solving the translation of puns in advertising English.

Chapter two is a Literature Review which proves my research is well grounded in theory, dealing with the definitions of main concepts in the relevant theories in the present study. The former two provide the basic principles of translating puns in advertising English, while the latter two state the specific strategies and for translating puns in advertising English.

Chapter there presents a core research question, including the common applications of puns in advertising English which consist of four types, homonymic puns, homographic puns, semantic puns and idiomatic puns.

Chapter four illustrates the functions of puns in advertising English which constitute information function, demand creation function, persuasive function, get action function and goodwill establishment function.