Advertising Communication Features and Advertising Translation (I)

Abstract : This paper analyzes the various communication features of advertising communication that are formed directly or indirectly under the influence of advertising social function. Then it discusses advertisement translation standards and the issue of “translatability” and “must translatability” of advertisements. The communicative features have a great influence on advertising translation. It is believed that advertising translation has its own particularity different from other kinds of translation. It is better to use the three equivalent translation standards of the audience's “understanding”, “acceptance” and “reaction”.

Keywords: advertisement communication advertisement translation translation standard translatability must-translate

The research on advertisement translation in our country has made great progress in recent years, but it is still not very mature compared to the urgent need of China's foreign-related advertising after the passage of the world. Some people consider "utilitarian supreme" advertising discourse as "artistic supreme" literary works, focusing on practical analysis of language skills (this tendency is particularly noticeable in articles that are translated into thematic texts). Its research results can hardly play its guiding role in the advertising operation of real knife. Contrary to the tendency of disengagement in advertisement translation studies, some companies have shown a lack of understanding of the particularities of advertising translation in the practice of external advertising. The most typical example is the abuse of translations in external advertising. . Misunderstandings in the understanding and operation of advertising translation show that China's advertising translation research needs to be more closely integrated with reality. This article takes the perspective of advertising communication, it is trying to observe the phenomenon of advertising translation from the field of interaction between social demand and language phenomenon, and discusses the characteristics of advertising translation.

First, advertising communication features

Advertising is a kind of communication - many advertisers use communi-cator to confess (Nofim H.1966). Leech (1974) believes that the general pattern of communication should be as shown in Figure 1:

Naturally, this model also applies to advertising communication. However, each element of advertising communication has its own uniqueness, and the formation of each element of characteristics and the traceability of the elements are all due to the influence of advertising social functions.

(I) Utilitarian characteristics of advertising communication

The most important social function for advertising to develop and develop lies in its economic and commercial effects, which are manifested in the production and sales of advertisements, stimulating demand, accelerating circulation and expanding sales, promoting the production and operation of enterprises, and promoting the growth of social wealth. . Advertising is a "paid way of disseminating information." From a business perspective, this kind of payment "should be regarded as an investment activity" in order to obtain the benefits of the advertiser's expected investment by dissipating promotions. Advertising communication thus brings with it a distinctive feature that makes it different from its kind of communication—a strong utilitarian purpose.

Any communication has its own purpose, but it does not necessarily have obvious utilitarian purposes; literary communication for the United States, science and technology communication fax, and advertisers to participate in advertising communication is to profit. The utilitarian purpose of advertisement communication directly reflects the main social function of advertisements. It is the basic point of view of advertisements for advertising operators to operate their advertisements. It should also be a basic starting point for us to study the style of advertising and its translation.

(II) Characteristics of “talkers” in advertising communication

The utilitarian purpose of advertising communication makes advertisement communication "speaker" (source, coder) have two major characteristics:

(1) It is a group that operates in an orderly manner according to the rules of business activities. It includes advertisers within advertisers and advertising agency companies, not just copywriters. In terms of the relationship between the author and the text, the position of the ad copywriter in the communication cannot be compared with the author of a work such as literature and technology.

(2) Advertising communication “Speaker” (specifically, advertisers) as a potential beneficiary of advertising communication shall pay for advertising communication unilaterally. This is in contrast to the communication costs of beneficiary audiences, such as TV dramas, films, and even literary communication, which are common forms of communication.

(III) Advertising Communication Demographics

The utilitarian nature of advertisements acts on the “callee” (information target, decoder)—advertising audience—of advertising communication through various channels, making it the most characteristic communicator in all forms of communication. The main characteristics of the advertising audience should be:
(1) "Audience supremacy" feature The success of an advertising campaign depends entirely on the audience's reaction to it. For business activities, the customer is God; for the advertising campaign, God is the audience.
(2) The “Uncooperative Audience” feature—Advertising audiences have instincts for their utilitarian purpose and often do not cooperate with advertising communication. _
(3) Audience group and uncertainty characteristics. This means that every mistake in an advertisement may be "everybody sees it," and every audience that meets with it may "be no cause afterwards."

(4) Features of advertising communication channels

Like other commercial activities, advertising also pursues “profit maximization”, and advertisers use the mass media with extremely wide coverage to influence the modern society to deliver advertising information. Due to the dual influence of advertising social functions and mass media, advertisement communication channels have the following characteristics:

(1) The "universality, unidirectionality, and multi-symbolity" of information dissemination (Torben Vestergaad & Kim Schröder, 1985)
(2) Restrictive effects of different types of media on the writing style of advertisements;
(3) High fees for advertising space and time.

(five) advertising information and its coding characteristics

In order to effectively disseminate advertising information in order to achieve advertising utilisation purposes, advertisements form the following characteristics in terms of information and coding:

(1) The apparent meaning and deep meaning of the advertisement signatures are separated (Hou Weirui, 1997).

(2) Advertising Signs are multi-symbol - advertising language in a broad sense includes various symbol systems such as text, images, sounds, and music. (3) The advertising coding process is an exceptionally complex system project - the copywriting is not the product of the writer's autonomy as it is in literary works. It is only part of the complex advertising coding system project, and it is also non-literature. Symbol coding, which precedes the establishment of advertising goals and advertising budgets, product and consumer surveys, and advertising planning and creativity based on this - and the text is merely a textualization of ideas (its theme, image, and style are (as defined by the idea), followed by a copy test J that detects the target audience's understanding, acceptance, and response. There are specific media restrictions on the style of the advertising work and, finally, a specific target audience.

(6) Characteristics of Advertising Communication Context

The characteristics of advertising communication context are mainly seen in three aspects:

(1) Non-verbal symbols frequently used in advertisements become the "context" of ad text.

(2) Advertising texts have a high-context (high-c0ntext). They want to dissuade them from advertising, but they must do their best to deal with uncooperative audiences. Advertisement texts (especially those based on emotional appeals) The discourse is full of self-evident presuppositions and implicit meanings outside of the word. The writing is highly contextual (this is the contextual characteristic of acquaintances). (3) High attention is paid to the target audience context assessment. Communication is an ostensive.inferentia1 process. The speaker must make a proper estimate of the listener's cognitive context so that the listener can correctly derive his or her intentions. The high linguistic context of the advertising language and the high degree of separation between the surface meaning and the deep meaning increase the audience's reasoning difficulty, but the advertiser cannot take the detached attitude of the audience as a writer. They must try their best to strive for the accurate communication of advertising intentions. This makes the target audience cognitive context assessment more important in the advertising operation. From a communicative point of view, the consumer survey before the ad copy draft and the sample audience copy test after the prosecution were actually an audience context assessment. This kind of audience context assessment which consumes a lot of money and energy has become another prominent feature of advertising communication context.