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Chapter One Introduction
China, one of the fastest growing economies in the world, is attracting more and more foreign enterprises to move their production to this huge market. The trend of foreign enterprises to promote their products in China has brought up the mounting need for good foreign advertisements. Successful ads need to draw customers' attention, helping them to remember the products or services. Such point must be conveyed clearly and immediately in advertisements so they can resonate with consumers and generate increased consumption of their products or services. Likewise, a good advertisement translation has equal importance, with the eventual purpose of realizing the anticipated functions of advertisements among the target text (TT) receivers. However, the researches about advertising translation mostly focus on the strategy and principle of translation or the difference between Chinese and Western culture while ignoring the differences of translation between Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan although the three places share the same origin of Chinese culture. In recent years, the total amount of advertising in China's Mainland has surpassed that of any other countries in the world, emerging as the world leader in advertising industry. At the same time, advertising in Taiwan and Hong Kong also has entered a more standardized and mature stage of development. Drawing on the successful experience in advertising creation and share with each other is of great significance for the three places to enhance their innovation of advertising and seek common ground from which to address common questions.Therefore, this thesis will discuss the reasons behind these differences and explore whether the three places can learn from each other to improve their creation in advertising translation and demonstrate a trend of integration as more frequent exchanges between the three places.
1.1 Literature Review
Many western scholars have dedicated to studying advertising translation, in the course of its development, it can be pided into two periods: the second half of the 20th century and the 21st century.
Hurbin studied adverting translation in 1972 when the advertisement industry was not very popular. “He points out that there are a number of translation for any source text and it is the translator's task to choose the most appropriate one from these possibilities.” (Liu, 2014, p. 17). After that, Slater (1984) mentioned that advertising translation is just like recreating advertisement, so in the process of translation not only the convey of vocabulary and image message, but also the acceptability of the target market (pp. 21-22).
Claude Tatilon (1900) who leans heavily on functional equivalence suggests that functional mode should value target text while keep faithfulness to source text (pp. 243-246). George (2004) takes a lot of examples in his books to illustrate that advertising translation is not only exchanges between languages, but many other factors such as values, religious believes and social forms should be taken into consideration in the process of translation (pp. 135-138).
Guidere (2001) carefully described the interactions between advertisement and translation, saying that International advertising consists of using the same strategy of communication in all targeted countries (p. 1). It point out that advertising has to resolve a dilemma that can be summarized in the following question: How can we sell a standardized product to local and different consumers? De Mooij (2004) argued that customers' behaviors are dependent on their cultural values which is also related to customers' need, motivation and emotions (pp. 256-259).
In 1990s the principles and standards of advertising translation began to be discussed by scholars. “No matter which style is adopted in the above-mentioned specific cases, the overall purpose is to facilitate different TT readers' reception of what is conveyed in Bible.” (Tan, 2004, p. 29) This is because “purposiveness inherent in all selections of translation action as well as the multi-leveledness of translation purpose.”(Fan & Liu, 2002, pp. 17-36) . Given the above, although it seems that there have been a lot of papers and essays on advertising translation, the quality of domestic research on this field is far from being satisfying enough. The author notices that the past studies on advertising translation was mainly discussed from the viewpoint of linguistic and pragmatic translation while seldom from the perspective of target text(TT)’s functions. There is a lack of effective and systematic application of theory into practice, so it is crucial to find a link between them. As one of the most influential and important translation theory of German functionalist approaches, Skopos theory can effectively explain translation phenomena and guide the development of China's translation. For some scholars, they may pay attention to the different culture between China and western countries, but to some extent, the mainland's advertising translation also has some differences with Hong Kong and Taiwan, which most of the time is ignored. Compared with the more standardized and mature advertising translation in Hong Kong and Taiwan, the mainland should learn from the other two places to approach to perfection in advertising translation. As for research in this fields, few scholars have attached more importance, so guided by Skopos theory which can been seen as an effective and influential way to advertising translation, this thesis want to discuss the differences and the integrating trend between Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan to improve the current advertising translation situation.