Abstract

With the unceasing development of globalization, international market is becoming increasingly popular, more and more corporations devoting to develop foreign markets. And advertising is being attached great importance as a key element to achieve a significant penetration in the foreign market. Generally speaking, the effectiveness of advertising translation is embodied in whether the consumers decode the advertisements correctly, and whether the meanings are transferred successfully. However, the cultural differences between different countries give rise to different languages and different values people have. It makes hence the effectiveness hardly been achieved.

Therefore, advertising translation emphasizes not merely the language-shifting, but the cultural adaptation. The ultimate purpose of advertising is to persuade consumers to purchase, so advertising translation ought to be based on the target cultural approval. Nevertheless, trademark, as an explicit part of advertisement, plays an important role in advertising translation. Since purpose of advertising translation is to promote products, which equals to promote the trademark, the brand of the product. This thesis starts from functionalist approach to translation in the perspective of Skopostheorie to analyze advertising translation, and then lead to target-language-culture oriented strategy. Furthermore, analysis of influence of cultural differences between China and the West on trademark translation would be present. The main points are as follow:

1. Translation and culture influence each other. The process of translation involves linguistic matter as well as cultural matter. The close relationship between translation and culture cannot be neglected.
2. In line with Vermeer's Skopostheorie，the skopos of target text in the target culture is stressed. In advertising translation, the commercial skopos of promoting sales is taken priority over others. Thereby the translator has enough freedom to choose favorable strategies to meet the function. Normally, the target-language-culture oriented strategy is the basic one.
3. The translation of trademark requires translator to master both Chinese and Western cultures, especially English-speaking countries. Cultural differences have great influence on translation. The cultural differences mainly are analyzed from three aspects: worldviews, values and norms. To avoid cultural taboos is necessary, and it is important to make sure the translation is understandable to target consumers.

Key words: Advertising trademark, cultural differences, Skopos, target-language-culture orientation, translation