Abstract:

With the development of the society, more and more people notice the importance of advertisements in our daily life. In recent decades, the situation of “Good wine needs no bush” is becoming outdated. The public awareness of corporation’s brands depends on the corporation’s propaganda of its brand and advertisement is a best approach to improve the effect of corporation’s brands. But, the most important thing is public understanding of corporation’s advertisements. Therefore, the translation of advertisements is so significant that it deserves an intensive and systematic study. The translation of advertisements can help people have a better understanding of the products and the culture which they represent so as to conduct a successful cross-cultural communication. This paper will explore the translation of English advertisements under the guidance of prototype theory, which will hopefully deepen people’s understanding of the nature of advertisement translation and broaden the way of studying advertisement translation.

Key words: advertisement English; prototype theory; translation

摘要:

随着时代的发展，越来越多的人开始注意到广告在生活中的重要性。近几十年来，那种“酒香不怕巷子深”的观念越来越少。大众对一种企业品牌的认知度取决于公司对品牌的宣传力度上。广告是一种最好的宣传手段,而这其中最重要的就是人们对于企业广告的理解，因此，广告翻译显得尤为重要。它有助于人们顺利了解产品信息，理解他国文化，促进跨文化交际的成功实施，值得更加深入系统的研究。本文在原型理论的指导下来探讨英语广告的翻译，以期引导人们更深入地理解广告翻译的本质，为广告翻译研究拓宽思路。

关键词：英语；广告；原型理论；翻译

Introduction
With the development of society and economy, advertisements have been infiltrating in every field of the society and have become one of the essential parts in people's life. No matter it is business advertisement or non-profit advertisement, advertisement making is a comprehensive art. This art needs much more skills and technique than other arts do, for it is the combination of sociology, aesthetics, psychology, marketing, acoustics, literature and linguistics.
According to AMA(American Marketing Association): Advertising is the nonpersonal communication usually paid for and usually persuasive in nature about products, services of ideas by identified sponsors through the various media. Therefore, advertisements aim to provide the public with the related information about products or services and more importantly, to persuade them to take action.
However, as is known to all, any advertisement exists in a certain society, so it is inevitably influenced by its social environment, including the economy, technology and culture etc. Due to different social systems and historical backgrounds, there must be some cultural and linguistic differences between Chinese and English advertisements.