Translation under the guidance of translation variation technique: the case of written advertising

ABSTRACT

This paper sought to study the strategies of variation in translating advertisements from English to Chinese and vice versa. For this, an analysis of a sample of 28 advertisements, logos, and headlines was conducted, among which 8 samples having English-Chinese and Chinese-English variation translation alternatives were selected for further examination. Their discourse analysis showed that the average number of possible variation translations per material unit (message, headline, logo) was 1–2, whereas for literal translation, only 1 variant was available. The success of variation translation was achieved through grammatical transformation, omission, approximation, addition, lexical units’ relocation and substitution, synonymisation, and paraphrasing. The comparative analysis showed that the literal translation was less effective than the variation, as it was not always possible to achieve the maximum effect from the advertising and influence the reader. The collected findings may add to further research in the field of linguistics, translation, marketing, and copywriting, as they provide useful data on the linguistic strategies of modern brand advertising campaigns. They could also be used in the subsequent studies focusing on machine or computer-assisted translation tools or evaluating the quality of translation and its impact on consumers.

KEYWORDS:

• Advertising campaigns
• cross-cultural translation strategies
• lexical and syntactic invariants
• variation translation
• English and Chinese advertisements

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Data availability statement

Data will be available on request.

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes on contributors

XiaoFei Guo

XiaoFei Guo has a Master Degree. Works as an Associate Professor at School of Foreign Languages, Harbin University of Commerce. Research areas: foreign languages, management.