基于多模态话语分析的平面商业广告英汉翻译研究

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION

1.1 Research Background

In  the  context  of  global  visual  culture,  our  daily  life  is  becoming  more  and  more pervasively  mediated  by multimodal  discourses  and  increasingly  shaped  by  its presentations produced all over the world. For example, we see images, color, sound and  some  other  non-verbal  resources  used  in  advertisements,  posters,  packages, teaching text books and so on; we also see many dynamic multimodal texts in our daily life such as multimedia classroom teaching, academic speech delivery; the household familiarized different kinds of web hypertexts and even computer games. The use of so many semiotic resources in public communication has shown that meaning is realized not only by language, but also through the integrated use of a wide range of semiotic resources including static and dynamic ones.

Among various kinds of products, digital ones like laptop, cellphone, iPad, music player have become much closer to people’s daily life, forming a large market. The competition among those digital product manufacturers is fierce, so in order to gain more  market  share  they  have  to  invest  more  advertisements.  Currently,  giant  digital manufacturers are  all  multinational  corporations,  for  example  Apple  Computer, Samsung Electronics and Logitech, which means they own market share in different countries worldwide. Thus, they have to invest a lot of advertisements for both their brands and products in each target market. If the advertisement for each one is totally originally  designed,  the  cost  will be  so  high  that  much  surpasses  what  those corporations afford and it’s not necessary since the features of many target market is similar. It is obvious that to translate the source advertisement into different languages is  multinational corporations’ best choice, which reduces the cost of redesign and remains the original creative effects. The research on advertising translation not only contributes  to  the  development  of  relevant  theoretical  research  but  also  benefits the demand of the translation market.

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1.2 Research Purpose and Rationale

1.2.1 Research Purpose

Advertisement  translation  is  not  a  fresh  research  topic,  and  previously  much achievement has been made already, such as the exploration of translation for specific terms in advertisements and some problems existing. Also, the theoreticframeworks they  used  are  various  including  skopostheorie,  relevance  theory,  adaptation  theory, reception aesthetics  theories  and  cross-cultural  communication  theories.  However, these researches are not sufficient, and they are not so powerful to guide the translating procedure as the use of multimodal materials in the print commercial advertisement has driven  the  trend,  because  they  neglect  the  meaning  of  those  pictures  used  in  the advertisement and ignore the importance of the coordination between text and pictures, both  meaning  and composition, i.e.  they  merely  focus  on  textual  materials  without thinking  about  the  integrated  meaning  of  advertisement which  involves  pictures, composition, typeface as a whole.

Therefore, within the traditional translation stand field when doing advertisement translating practice, people may find it hard to grasp the comprehensive meaning of the source text, and it even causes some misunderstanding or inadequate understanding. Moreover, the translator may hardly realize the advertising effect or appeal as strong as the original advertisement, and it harms the promotion or marketing effectiveness of the products.

An extended research surpassing the text-based advertisement translation should be made  in  case  the  above dilemma,  and  multimodal  discourse  analysis  gives  us  an enlightenment of the framework to study it systematically. On one hand, the research of multimodal discourse analysis is well developed which provides us many successful models and  theoretical  foundations;  on  the  other  hand,  seldom  ones  concern  on  the interface  study  of  translation, especially  advertisement  translation,  and  multimodal discourse analysis. Based on these facts and problems, the author launches this research work and tries to make some effort for the improvement of both fields, especially the practical part involved.

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CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Advertisement Translation

2.1.1 Basic Notions, Features and Functions of Advertising

American Marketing Association claims advertising involves: "planning and executing the  conception,  pricing,  promotion, and  distribution  of  ideas,  goods,  and  services  to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational objectives" (Smith & Braley, 1997:174), and "it is non-personal communication of information usually paid for and usually persuasive in nature" (Arens, 2005).

Advertising itself is multi-semiotic; it has the feature of intertextuality. Language, images and music-the verbal, visual or aural elements which can trigger the attention of consumers, can be seen or heard on a poster, TV or some other media. Just as Resch (Hornby,  2006)  put  it  that  a  meaningful  message  is  merged  by  the  individual components like image, language, and sound etc.; "the text is perceived in its entirety, understanding is to a great extent dependent on the user's ability to integrate the multi-semiotic  components  into  a  complete  whole"(2006:138).  In  terms  of creativity  and appreciation, the form, with the content in successful advertising is well-designed and arranged  so  that advertising  art  can  even  be  called.  Therefore,  when  translating advertisement,  none  of  its  components  should be  ignore,  based  which  creative expressions are meaningful to attract the consumers. 

A  good  and  accurate  advertisement  will  arouse  directly  or  secondarily  active feedback. How to make a good advertisement requires dealing with its components well, especially the text since it’s the most direct way to provide information. Cook (2001:6) "An ad is not a tangible or stable entity; it is the dynamic synthesis of many components, and comes  into  being  through  them."  Apart  from  language,  in  print  advertisement images components cover like society, substance, and functions, etc. and changing them usually "entails a change in the whole". In short, advertising is generally considered as "a form of communication" (Dyer, 1990) and it is a communicative process. 

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2.2 Studies of Image-text Relations within Multimodal Discourse Analysis

Image-text relation is one of the focus issues in multimodal discourse analysis, because these two semiotic expression forms, image and text, are the most widely used ones, whose relations are fundamental and easy to form a framework for more sophisticated discourse analysis. Barthes (1977) first set food on the deep discussion upon image-text relations from semiotics. In 1990s many systematic functional semiotic researchers, for instance, Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996), Lemke (1998), Martinec (1998), Royce (1998) and  O'Halloran  (1999)  have  started  to  do  deconstruction  research on  image-text relations  in  multimodal  discourse,  and  become  the  most  active  force  in  this  field. Generally saying,  there  are  four  typical  approaches  of  image-text  relation  study: Barthes’  "Anchorage-illustration-relay" theory,  Kress  and  Van  Leeuwen's  Visual Grammar,  Bateman's  multimodal  genres  study,  Martinec  and  Salway's Network  of Combined Status and Logico-semantics.

In Barthes’ theory, there are three kinds of relations between image and text: anchorage, illustration and relay (Barthes, 1977:15). Anchorage means that compared with text the meaning of image is not always confirmed, and text could anchor whose meaning. Specifically, text extends the meaning of image or adds more information; text explains the meaning of image in a more detailed way, and repeats its information. Illustration  is  opposite.  In  this  kind  of situation, image  contains  the  parasitic information  in  the  discourse  and  explains  text.  Relay  means  image  and text  are complementary in position, which could often be found in speech balloon. For example, the  speaker  and  the context  is presented  by  image,  and  the  conversation  content  is presented by text. This relation seems seldom in multimodal print discourse, but it is frequently used in animation.

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CHAPTER THREE THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK .................... 20

3.1 The Network of Combined Status and Logico-semantics for Image-text Relations..................... 20

3.1.1 Foundation of Martinec and Salway’s Image-text Relation System ........ 20

CHAPTER  FOUR  ANALYSIS  OF  PRINT  ADVERTISEMENT  TRANSLATION FOR DIGITAL PRODUCTS BASED ON IMAGE-TEXT RELATIONSHIPS ......... 39

4.1 Analysis of Translation under Independent-exposition Relationship ................ 40

4.2 Analysis of Translation under Independent-exemplification Relationship ........ 44

CHAPTER FIVE CONCLUSION ................. 70

5.1 Major Findings of the Study ......... 70

5.2 Implications of the Study ............. 72

CHAPTER FOUR ANALYSIS OF PRINT ADVERTISEMENT TRANSLATION FOR DIGITAL PRODUCTS  BASED ON IMAGE-TEXT RELATIONSHIPS

4.1 Analysis of Translation under Independent-exposition Relationship

Figure 4.1 is a print advertisement of iPad Air, a tablet computer in which various kinds of applications could be installed realizing countless functions, for example gaming, reading digital publications, watching a film, etc. So it's a perfect choice as a gift, for example in this advertisement iPad Air is a Father's Day gift.

In this advertisement the image part is composed by two pieces of iPad Air, one of which is open and displays a photo of a smiling father with his kid playing. Easily to be found that it suggests to the consumers: father will be pleased to open and to use iPad Air in their daily life, so buying your father an iPad Air means giving him a useful and happiness oriented gift. The text part is "a Father's Day gift he'll open every day". This sentence is condensed but focus-highlighted and meaning completely filled. 

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CHAPTER FIVE CONCLUSION

5.1 Major Findings of the Study

Many  studies  on  discourse  analysis  have  shifted  from  text  only  to  multimodality, starting to take all of the semiotic resources including image, animation, gesture, and sound into account. The scale of "discourse" has been widely extended, but there's a lack  of  the  systematic  analysis  from  the  perspective  of  pragmatic  translation  under multimodal discourse viewpoint. This thesis addresses theoretical and practical issues of  print  commercial  advertisement translation  in  this  field,  since  the  multimodal condition in this kind of data is simple, and advertisement translation study is practical necessity driven for the rapid development of multinational corporations.

The  critical  issue  of  this  study  is  how  to  translate  advertising  words  when considering the multi-semiotic discourse condition in print advertisements. To find a comprehensive  answer,  the  author  gives  three  relevant  questions.  On the  basis  of literature  reviewing,  theoretical  framework  construction  and  case  study,  the  author proposes some possible answers to these questions.

Firstly, how to describe the features of image-text relations in print advertisements? The author finds that Martinec and Salway’s system of combined status and logico-semantics  is  appropriate.  It  gives  14  kinds  of  image-text  relations in  print  material, focusing on both surface structure and deep organizational mechanism.

Secondly,  how  do  these  image-text  relations  coordinate  to  generate  a  strong advertising effectiveness? Such effectiveness works in readers’ mind, and the author applies a psychological approach to answer this question: the Gestalt Theory. Gestalt psychology  with  its  five  main  concepts  clearly  explains  the  reason  why  image strengthens the expressing effect of advertising words, and it demonstrates that different image-text relations generate advertising effectiveness in different gestalt ways, so to meet  the  advertising  appeal  is to  reconstruct  gestalt  effect  according to  the  different features of image-text relations when translating. 

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