Abstract

Advertising, as an important source of information, has become an indispensable part in sales promotion. Meanwhile, the globalization of markets also means companies today are dealing with an incredibly varied target group, with many different languages and more importantly, different cultures. In order to increase sales, advertising should earn the consumers’ respect，by developing cultural appeal. To fulfill such purpose, research on advertising translation has played a crucial role.
With translation studies, research has focused more on comparative analysis of language pairs for inter－systematic differences; more recently on intercultural differences in product appeal and cultural values .How can features of cross-cultural divergence, which play a fundamental role in the creation of a message and its impact, be accounted for the advertising translating procedure?
This thesis discusses the significance of culture in the process of translating international advertisements, based on the theory of Cultural Paradox by De Mooij. To push the products towards a truly global brand, it then demonstrates the four commonly employed appropriate strategies of translating advertisements by ways of ample exemplification. By progressive comparison and contrast, the paper finally tries to explore and illustrate the effectively proposed method for the development of international advertising campaigns-Transcreation.

Key words: advertisement; culture; cross-cultural communication; translation; trans-creation

摘  要

De Mooij的文化悖论理念指出：人们的思想，价值观念，行为和情感都是文化的产物。个人是传统文化模式影响下的个体，而广告则是文化模式体系的反应，文化的点点滴滴均在广告中得以体现。本文根据这一理念，从跨文化交际视角研究商业广告翻译，探讨跨文化交际在商业广告翻译中的重要作用。为提高译者的翻译水平和技巧，文章分析了商业活动中常用的四种翻译策略：直译，意译，改译和创意。通过对4种翻译方法的对比分析，文章指出创意是一种符合国际标准的有效翻译策略，希望此策略能为商业广告翻译的研究提供有益的参考和借鉴，最终促使各种品牌走向世界知名品牌。

关键词：广告；文化；跨文化交流；翻译；创译

1. Introduction
With the increase of global trade and the rapid emergence of the global company, the idea was born that it would be cost-effective to develop all sorts of advertising in the home country into other countries, either in the English language or to be translated into many different languages. But advertising has developed its own particular systems of meaning. These are by no means universal across borders but are often culturally defined and frequently vary from country to country. Therefore translating advertising texts is like painting the tip of an iceberg. What you see are the words, but there is a lot behind the words that must be understood to transfer advertising from one culture to another.