论文总字数：29174字

摘 要

随着中国经济的发展，中国的广告业也以一种惊人的速度发展。因此，广告翻译吸引了越来越多的关注。广告翻译是一种跨文化交际活动，文化差异对广告翻译具有重大影响。本文从文化差异的角度入手，采用案例比较法比较了中西文化的差异，强调这些文化差异对广告翻译的影响。本文由六个部分组成。第一章介绍本文的研究背景、目的和意义。第二章是文献综述，回顾了中西方广告翻译的历史，并提出当前广告翻译中存在的问题，第三章介绍广告的定义，目的与影响。第四章主要分析文化差异及其对广告翻译的影响。第五章探讨广告翻译中的文化顺应。第六章是本文的总结，并为未来的研究提出一些建议。

关键词：广告翻译；文化差异；文化顺应

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 1

3. Advertising 3

3.1 Definition of advertising 3

3.2 Purpose of advertising 3

3.3 Impact of advertising 4

4. Cultural Differences and Their Impacts on Advertising Translation 4

4.1 Differences in cultural values 5

4.2 Differences in viewpoints 5

4.3 Differences in life styles 6

4.4 Differences in purchasing psychology 7

4.5 Differences in aesthetic standards 8

5. Cultural Adaptation Applied in Advertising Translation 8

5.1 Adaptation to the social world 9

5.2 Adaptation to the physical world 10

5.3 Adaptation to the mental world 10

6. Conclusion 11

Works Cited 13

1. Introduction

With the development of economic globalization, international economic cooperation is gradually expanding, thus trade is becoming more and more frequent. In the face of opportunities and challenges, countries are expected to improve their own strength in foreign trade. Advertisement, one of the most powerful means of marketing, plays a vital role in the development of foreign trade. Since the reform and opening up, China’s economy develops rapidly and its advertising industry also develops at an unprecedented speed. Therefore, advertising translation has become increasingly important in the economic life. Advertising translation accuracy is directly related to the final effect of advertising. Proper advertising translation can not only attract the reader’s attention, promote their purchasing behavior, but also effectively establish our export products’ good image and reputation in the international area.

Advertising translation is a cross-cultural communication. Cultural differences have a significant impact on advertising translation. In fact it can be said that a certain cultural tradition, belief and value largely affect the commercial operators and consumers’ psychology and behavior, and then affect the national advertising campaign. Successful advertising translation will bring huge economic benefits; on the contrary, unsuccessful advertising translation will not only bring economic loss to companies and countries, but also affect its image. It can be seen that cultural differences have a real impact on advertising translation. Cultural factor has always been an unavoidable problem. This paper collects abundant advertising translation examples to analyze and discuss the differences and the impact on advertising translation between Chinese and western culture.

2. Literature Review

Nowadays, advertising translation has played an increasing important role in introducing the products and promoting the sales abroad. Advertising translation involves many factors, such as linguistic rules, cultures, consumption mentality and so on. Therefore, advertising translation can’t be a simply mechanical translation activity. When it comes to the study on advertising translation, it is very necessary for us to have an overall view on the current research and understand it more deeply. Domestic and foreign scholars did a lot of important research on advertising translation.

Western study on advertising translation started in 1972. Hurbin’s article Peut-on traduire la langue de la publice first mentioned advertising translation in his studies. His study reflects the value of advertising translation studies. Over the next twenty years, there was a big change in translation studies (Nida, 1993). Scholars began to concern about functionalism rather than equivalence. However, this period still lacked some evidence of the research. Since 1995, there have been more and more studies carried out in the advertising translation. Guidere’s book Translating Ads describes the interaction between advertising and translation in the era of globalization. Besides this, in 2001, Sperber and Wilson developed relevance theory in the book Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Moreover, Verschueren’s adaptation theory also has a powerful explanation to advertising translation.

Domestic scholars began to study on advertising translation in the early 1990s. This stage is mainly about the study on advertising translation problems and the specific advertising language translation. For example, Fan Yanbo points out the problems in translating brand names from Chinese into English. Li Xiangde talks about how to translate the four-character phrases in advertising translation work. Liu Xinlin points out that commercial advertising translation often have some problems and do not meet the conditions in China. The next stage involves advertising translation principles and standards. During this period scholars and translators started to consider many aspects about advertising translation, such as the beauty of the advertising language, the consumers’ psychology and so on. Jia Wenbo points out that advertising translation is different from other translation. It is not only for people to enjoy, more important is to draw people’s attention to the advertising goods, and stimulate people’s purchasing desire and behaviors. However, only a few do their researches with the guidance of translation theory. Until the 21th century, many kinds of western translation theories are introduced to our country and there’s a cultural-turn in translation studies. Shi Yeli points out that advertising translation is related to the basic concepts of functional equivalence. He Shuang tries to deal with the cultural differences in advertising translation by using the principle of dynamic equivalence.

All in all, in the past twenty years, there’s a big change in advertising translation studies. It’s still a successive and developing course.

3. Advertising

3.1 Definition of advertising

The word “advertise” derives from Latin word “advertere”, meaning “to make it known to the public”. Definition of advertising is divided into broad and narrow sense. Broadly speaking, advertising is widely to inform the public of some campaigns. Narrowly speaking, advertising is a product or service that disseminates its information by media with various ways. There are also some other versions of the meaning of advertising.

Encyclopedia Britannia Dictionary explains advertising as the following: advertising is the techniques used to bring products, services, opinions, or appeals to public notice for the purpose of persuading the public to respond in a certain way towards what is advertised. It can be said that advertising is very important for media to earn income, such as newspapers, magazines, televisions or Internet. American Marketing Association defines advertising as “the non-personal communication of information usually paid for and usually persuasive in nature about products, services or ideas by identified sponsors through the various media. (Zhao Jing, 1992:48). It can be seen that there are some basic characteristics of advertising. Firstly, it is not a communication of information between people, but for a particular group. Secondly, it is usually paid by manufacturers. Thirdly, it is usually persuasive. Fourthly, it is the introduction and promotion for products, services, or ideas. Fifthly, it can be used in various medium.

3.2 Purpose of advertising

By the definition of advertising, it can be said that the purpose of advertising is to persuade the public to take action. For products, advertising tries to convince the public to take purchasing behaviors. It tries to convince consumers that the products are superior to any other products and will satisfy their needs. For services, advertising tries to persuade the public to take ordering behavior. For ideas or reasons, it tries to persuade the public to take accepting actions, such as some public service advertising, which encourages people to drive safely or to support a variety of charities.

All in all, advertising is an effective way for companies and business to promote their products, services or ideas to the consumers.

3.3 Impact of advertising

Today, people in modern society have been very familiar with advertising and they can see or hear many kinds of advertising anytime and anywhere. Advertising has a great influence on our social lives. Firstly, advertising helps to spread the information of products or services to the consumers. It is very helpful for consumers to understand the products, so as to promote consumers’ purchasing behaviors. Secondly, advertising has an influence on audiences’ awareness. Especially some public service advertising, which helps audiences set up the consciousness of safe driving, protecting the environments and supporting the charities and so on. Last but not least, advertising helps to promote fair competition among businesses, which can promote the development of economy.

From the impacts mentioned above, we can see that advertising is very important. So it is very necessary to design and create useful and successful advertising.

4. Cultural Differences and Their Impacts on Advertising Translation

Nowadays, people pay more and more attention to cultural issues in translation activities. Famous scholar Wang Zuoliang once said that the greatest difficulty in translation is the differences between Chinese and western cultures, the translators must be really very intellectual. In fact, advertising translation is a cross-cultural communication. The cultural factors in dissemination are important parts in advertising translation. However, there are many differences between Chinese and western cultures, such as different cultural values, viewpoints, life styles and so on. All of these have a great impact on advertising translation.

4.1 Differences in cultural values

Every culture has its own unique values, which have special national characteristics and are deeply rooted in people’s minds. Values show people what is true, good and beautiful, and help people determine the actions and behaviors. Chinese cultural values have a profound humanism spirit and emphasize ethics and perceived competence. Chinese people are usually introverted and focus on the content and empirical evidence, while westerners are mostly extroverted. They focus on the external form and sensory effects.

The main difference of cultural values between Chinese and westerners is that Chinese emphasize collectivism while westerners advocate individualism. In the advertising creation, westerners design advertising with the theme of “personality” and “independence”. The word “you” is used frequently in English advertisements to persuade consumers and make them feel being respected, which promote the desire to consume. Therefore, some words or sentences in slogans like “special for you”, “meet your special needs” and “uniqueness of products” can be seen everywhere in the west. For example, a slogan of Tianjin taxi company “接天下客，送万里情” is translated into “Ready to meet you from all over the world”. This translation can greatly shorten the distance between consumers and advertisers in Western countries. If the word “客”is literally translated as “guests”, there will be a sense of distance.

By contrast, in China, the herd mentality becomes the main factor to promote consumers’ purchasing behavior. Many Chinese advertisements try to persuade consumers to buy the same products. Some translators ignore the differences between Chinese and Western values and literally translate the advertisements. Such as “男女老少皆宜”is translated into “suitable for people of all ages”, “大家都喜欢用”is translated into “loved by all”. Such advertisements fail to highlight the product’s target customers and suffered the ignorance from Western consumers.

Therefore, the difference between collectivism and individualism is an important factor that can’t be ignored in advertising translation.

4.2 Differences in viewpoints

People all over the world hold their own viewpoints. Different people have different viewpoints due to different cultural environments. And these differences have a great impact on advertising translation.

For example, in Chinese culture, people like to describe beautiful women as “玉”.So there are many sayings such as “美如玉”，“还您玉颜” used in the cosmetic advertising. If these are translated into “sweet as a jade”, it will certainly affect the product’s sales. The reason is that in westerners’ viewpoints, the word “jade” represents outdated interests or vulgar women. They used to describe a woman with a lily or rose. So the above piece of advertising should be translated into “sweet as a lily or rose”. Moreover, in Chinese people’s viewpoints, the words “芳芳” in Chinese culture often lead to a good association that a beautiful girl whose whole body gives off the fragrance. Our country has produced a kind of lipstick named “芳芳”, which is very popular with Chinese women. While in westerners’ viewpoints, if the words “芳芳”literally translated into “Fangfang”, it means snakes and dogs’ teeth, which may make the audience associate it with ferocious dogs and snakes and then arouse the audiences’ feeling of terror and danger. Because of this mistake in translation, it’s not difficult for us to imagine that “Fangfang” lipstick is unpopular in the foreign market.

From the above we can see that different viewpoints have a great influence on advertising translation. And when we carry out advertising translation activity, it is very necessary to make suitable translation according to different viewpoints.

4.3 Differences in life styles

People from different countries have different life styles. In Chinese culture, successful women should be gentle and graceful, capable and experienced, and they can balance the relationship between career and family very well. They usually like a peaceful and stable life style. Therefore, when we translate the advertising of women’s supplies, we should avoid using some words that are unsuitable for eastern women. For example, there is a slogan about a kind of perfume for Chanel “Spicy woody vanilla fragrance with a strong personality, for a mature impression”, a listed company in Hong Kong translates it into “辛辣木香调的香水特别适合有个性的女性使用，花香、木香再结合果香，体现出时代女性自我、干练又不失女性温柔的本色”.From this translation we can see that the word “strong” is lost. The reason is that in Chinese culture, “strong personality” may make women have an image of “女强人”, but most Chinese women want to be sweet and helpless birds in their daily lives. In addition, most Chinese people put family in the most important position in their lives. They always spend spare time accompanying their families. Some people away from home often feel homesick. Nowadays, many domestic advertisements are designed based on this phenomenon. For example, an advertisement for Coca-Cola is designed as “没有一种感觉比得上回家”. This advertisement fully reflects Chinese people’s homesick moods, and then appeal to many consumers to buy this product.

While in the west, most people yearn for a free and dynamic life style. They are willing to taking adventures and accepting any challenges. All of these can be seen in their advertisements—“Just do it (Nike Sportswear)” and “Nothing is impossible”, which are very popular in western countries. Moreover, a kind of drink named “seven-up” caters to Americans. It is the word “up” that represents a positive spirit, which fits with Americans’ life style.

4.4 Differences in purchasing psychology

In different cultural backgrounds, there are different purchasing psychologies between Chinese and Western countries. The psychological differences have an important influence on advertising translation. Advertising translation must take different cognitions and psychologies into consideration between Chinese and westerners, which can make consumers better understand the contents of advertisements.

For example, in the USA, people usually lose weight for fashion; so many products of losing weight are very popular. Our country has a high-quality product to lose weight named “轻身减肥片”, but no one shows any interests in it in the USA. Afterwards, the market survey finds the problem is that the product is translated into “Obesity-deducting Tablets”. In fact, in American’s minds, this product is specially for “obese people(特大胖子)” to take, which is against the purchasing psychologies of American consumers. When this product is translated into “Sliming Pills”, it becomes very popular in American market.

For another example, Chinese and westerners have different attitudes towards money. Westerners are so sensitive to the word “expensive” that it is a taboo language in advertising. So some expensive products are generally described as “not cheap”, “not the cheapest”, “reasonable” or “competitive”. While in China, people usually associate “expensive” with “high-quality”. They will not be disgusted with this word. They believe that “You get what you pay for(一分钱，一分货)”.

In a word, translators should pay more attention to the differences of purchasing psychology in advertising translation.

4.5 Differences in aesthetic standards

Aesthetic differences also have great impact on advertising translation. Different nations have different aesthetic standards due to different geographical environments, historical traditions and economic developments.

Some things considered beautiful in a nation may not be considered beautiful in another nation. For example, in Chinese culture, the word “whitening” is a commendatory term, and many people believe that white skin makes them look more beautiful. The saying “一白遮三丑”reflects Chinese aesthetic standards. So in many domestic skin care products’ introductions, the word “增白”is usually translated into “whiten the skin”. However, people in Western countries pursue healthy beauty, they like tanned skin. In their views, “white” is not only unbeautiful but also represents the poverty and disease. So many westerners are willing to spend money sunbathing to make the skin healthier. Based on the different aesthetic standards, this translation doesn’t meet the westerners’ aesthetic standards, which can’t win the market in the west.

Similarly, from the aspect of aesthetic standards, words with beautiful meanings can bring people better psychological reactions and visual effects. Such as “Coca Cola” is translated into “可口可乐”, “Cola Cao” is translated into “高乐高”, “Head and shoulders” is translated into “海飞丝”. All of these translations are very popular with consumers.

5. Cultural Adaptation Applied in Advertising Translation

Advertising translation is a special kind of cross-cultural communication. The translator must make reasonable cultural adaptation to meet the communicative needs, thus making the translated advertisements accepted by the public, so as to maximize the function of advertising. The following will introduce the treatment for adaptation in advertising translation.

5.1 Adaptation to the social world

Social world refers to the principles and norms of social occasions and social environments for communicators’ verbal behaviors. The culture plays a very important role in all of the factors in the social world. During the creation of advertising translation, it is very important for translators to understand the differences of the language and culture, aesthetic standards and cultural values between primitive audience and target audience, and make a dynamic adaptation.

For example, a slogan for Japanese Toyota auto is “Where there is a way, there is Toyota”. This advertising is from a very famous proverb “Where there is a will, there is a way” in English, and adapts to the Western social culture. So audiences accept this advertising with pleasure. When translated in Chinese, it is “车到山前必有路”from an ancient poem that audiences are very familiar with it. The following creation “车道山前必有路，有路就有丰田车” not only adapts to the original sentence’s structure, but also fully adapts to Chinese audiences’ social culture. It will be easily accepted by Chinese consumers and then win an enormous business opportunity.

For another example, an advertising of mobile phone for Ericsson Communication Company is designed as “Make you heard. (Ericsson)”. Its translation is “理解就是沟通（爱立信）”. This advertisement and its translation profoundly reveal the great difference of audiences’ value orientations due to different social cultures. The audiences under the influence of Western society mostly pay attention to outgoing personality and respect the facts, while Chinese audiences mostly emphasize collective cooperation and believe in authority. The word “yourself” and “沟通”fully express the great difference of value orientation between Chinese and western audiences. Therefore, the translator translates this advertisement into “理解就是沟通”on the basis of respecting the primitive audience’s value orientation, which well adapts to the social world of Chinese audiences and caters to Chinese audiences’ value orientations, and win the Chinese consumers’ recognition.

All in all, in the process of advertising translation, the translator must fully consider the factor of social world, especially cultural factors.

5.2 Adaptation to the physical world

The physical world mainly includes the reference of the time and space. The advertising translator must fully consider various factors in the audience’s physical world in the process of translation. It is very important for the advertising translator to make cultural adaptation to the audiences’ physical world.

For example, an advertisement for ice cream is designed as “Wall (Ice Cream)”, its Chinese translation is “和路雪”.We all know that the original Chinese meaning of the word “Wall” is “墙”, but the translation “和路雪”is completely unrelated to the original meaning. The reason is that the translator fully consider the consumption season of this product, “和路雪”can make consumers feel cool in Summer, and stimulate their purchasing desire. For another example, an advertisement of sports shoes for Reebok is designed in English as “Five feet nine inches in his socks, ten feet tall in his shoes (REEBOK)”. This advertising is first translated into “光脚身高五英尺九英寸，穿上锐步身高十英尺（锐步运动鞋）”. We all know that people in western countries describe the space length and height with “feet” and “inch”, while Chinese people describe a person’s height with “米”，“厘米”or “公分” and they usually don’t understand the concept of “inch” and “feet”. So the translation of advertisement above isn’t suitable for Chinese physical world. However, when it is translated into “光着脚丫身材矮小，穿上锐步高人一等（锐步运动鞋）”, it is easily understood by potential customers in Chinese market, making the original advertising achieve better promotional effect. In a word, it’s very important for advertising translators to adapt to the target audience’s physical world, which can realize the purpose of promoting consumers’ purchasing behaviors.

5.3 Adaptation to the mental world

The factors of cognition and emotions are important parts of the audience’s mental world. The purpose of advertising is to make consumers have deeply impression of promotional products, which is useful to promote consumers’ purchasing behaviors. Therefore, in the process of advertising translation, translators should try their best to make adaptation to audiences’ emotions, psychological needs and beliefs.

For example, an advertisement for watches is designed as “Time is what you make of it. (Swatch)”. Its translation is “天长地久（斯沃琪手表）”. We all know that “天长地久”in China means permanent things and eternal true love. This not only expresses the quality of the watch, but also expresses the friendship that it contains. Chinese people always put family in the most important position. The translator just grasps this psychology and adapts to the audience’s mental world, which arouse consumers’ purchasing desire. For another example, an advertisement for diamonds is designed as “Diamonds are forever. (DeBeers)”, and it is translated into “钻石恒久远，一颗永流传（戴比尔斯钻石）”. This translation has a beautiful sentence and rich connotation, which makes consumers deeply touched by the steadfast love. The translator not only expresses the true value of the diamond itself, but also combines diamonds with beautiful love perfectly. This translation gives audiences a wonderful association and adapts to the audiences’ desire for steadfast love.

6. Conclusion

Cultural differences exist everywhere, which make advertising translation become extremely challenging. The successful advertising translation requires translators to try their best to acquire more knowledge of cross-cultural communications and then to fully consider the cultural differences between Chinese and western countries. In the process of advertising translation, translators should adapt to the audiences’ social world, physical world and mental world, which make audiences under different cultural backgrounds know the product’s information and understand the advertising connotation. Only in this way, can audiences have the desire to buy advertising products and realize the purpose of promoting economic benefits.

In conclusion, advertising translation is a complicated process. We are supposed to make great efforts to explore and research it, making the advertising really play the role of information communication.

Works Cited

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[14] 赵静. 《广告英语》. 北京：外语教学与研究出版社, 1992.

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