Different counties have their own style in the aspect of language and thinking modes, and as a result, many western people can easily misunderstand the goods and service of China. As a consequence, it is particularly important for us to do a good job in publicity, and to accurately translate the Chinese advertisement into the target consumer’s original language. Good advertisement translation will be refreshing, arousing the target language consumers’ desire to purchase the items, so as to achieve the purpose of the advertisement language itself. The vague language of advertisement is considered as a research object in this paper. This paper will analyze the characteristics and application of vague language in advertisement from on two aspects, which are phonetics and semantics. And on the basis of analyzing the advertising translation of vague language methods, such as literal translation, free translation and creative translation, we are further to study the purpose of translation, from the perspective of skopos theory.
2. Fuzziness on Advertisement
2.1 The Origin and Effect of Fuzzy Language
It is considered that fuzzy theory was produced in the 20th century, but people started to recognize language fuzziness long before. In 1908, Marty, a German linguist, mentioned in his work that fuzziness refers to such a phenomenon that the ranges of certain names use are not strictly defined. British philosopher Bertram Russell published Vagueness (1923) and mentioned "language is fuzzy more or less ", thus the famous "baldheaded paradox" produced from it.( Li Qianju, 2007: 27) Blake indicated that the fuzziness of words refers to the limited scope and lacking clear provision in the use of words, in his thesis published in 1937. Cassirer, the German philosopher, also talked about the fuzziness of language in his Essay About Human (1944). “fuzzy” has became a term began by L. A. Zadeh, a cybernetics expert of University of California; he put forward the concept of “fuzzy sets” in his fuzzy sets (1965). (Li Qianju, 2007: 31) Then, fuzzy linguistics and other academic discipline have been developed.
Fuzziness is common in language which makes language more versatile and flexible. Fuzzy language has very strong communication and wide practicability; fuzzy language can make words more polite, plump and beautiful, bright and dark, fascinating.
Also in advertisement, the application of fuzzy language makes words more vivid and persuasive, and also indicates more meaning under simple words, which stimulate consumers’ imagination, attract their attention and raise their interest in order to enhance the advertising impressions.