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4 The Application of Parody in AT on Memetics
Parody in advertisements gives people a kind of feeling of intimacy, just like an ancient Chinese saying “Sommersby”, which narrows the gap between the advertising and the audience. The proper use of parody in AT not only makes the advertisements poetic and picturesque, but also deepens the cultural deposits of advertising products. So, due to the difficulties of advertisement translation, great numbers of Chinese and foreign advertising copywriters are favor of parody, and we can find examples too numerous to list. Also, the application of parody ranges from the famous idioms and proverbs, well-known poems and songs to popular couplets and buzzwords, which will be enumerated on memetics in the following part.
4.1 Difficulties of Advertisement Translation
It is fairly difficult to create an unbeaten advertisement of an original intelligence. Therefore, it is obviously not an easy task to translate an advertising context through an accurate and vivid way. The core of advertising is the language, which is invented by those discreet copywriters who choose their words carefully. So, in order to meet the different requirements of the seller, some of the advertisements are humorous and witty, some are frank and plain, some are graceful and profound.
Advertising is a mirror of culture, reflecting people's values and cultural practices, while translation is a cross-language and cross-cultural communication. Also, the language of advertising has its own characteristics, and advertising translation is totally distinguished from literature translation or other genre’s translation. In the process of translating literature works, the shortage of the translation can be easily compensated by adding footnotes or other forms. But living in such fast-paced era, consumers has already lost their patience to appreciate those redundant slogans. Thus, when copywriters are translating the advertising language, especially those advertisements with splendid connotation, it is impossible to add lengthy footnotes and descriptive words to achieve the communicative purpose. In this way, target audience sometimes cannot understand the information and message of the advertising slogan, not to mention appreciate the culture of words in those contexts.
The purpose and function of advertising is to sell goods, persuading the consumer to buy the advertised products. So, "advertising must be attractive, with ‘attention value’ and 'readability'."(Zhang, 2001:104). Whether in the source language or target language, the function of advertising is the same, so the translation should take the target consumers as the center, respect the culture of the target language, resonate the target consumers, and ultimately trigger the potential consumers to purchase the goods.
Fortunately, difficulties of AT can be partly solved by the proper use of parody in the process of multinational and cross-cultural translation. So, the applications of parody in AT will be enumerated and analyzed in view of memetics during the following part. Also, there is a translation version created by the author, which abides by the principal of parody translation.
4.2 Diversity of Parody in Advertisement Translation
In terms of material studied in this paper, it is the advertising slogan that is the core of the advertisement, which should directly and concisely express the advertiser's motivation, so only strap lines in ad are used for analysis in this thesis, not including music, pictures, subtitles, footnotes, or long passage content in advertisement.
As for the translation method, literal translation sometimes can not accurately convey the image of the primitive advertising. Exactly, some reference memes are available in the target language. At this point, translators can try to use those strong memes in target language, so as to retain the original imagery of primitive advertising, then migrate aesthetic figurative to the target language to guarantee that the original charm and the realm of advertising material is persevered. There are some different strong memes as follow.