On the Translation of Pun in English Advertising

On the Translation of Pun in English Advertising

1. Introduction

In modern society, advertising, the embodiment of commerce, has become an important part of our daily life. The intensification of international exchanges and the severe competition involve a growing need for advertising and thus of advertising translation. Across-cultural advertising translation has become a hot topic in the world of translation.It has a great influence on the international trade and products intercourse.

Punning is one of the most common rhetorical devices used in advertisement. There are various ways to form puns in advertisements.The translation of puns is difficult because of the double meanings, and the translation of puns in advertisements is even more difficult because one must keep both the double meanings of a pun and the style of the advertisement in mind. The barrier in translation exists as long as linguistic and cultural differences exist. However, there is no source text that is absolutely untranslatable. We should try to convert untranslatability into translatability, or make compensation in translation.In a word, the translation of English puns is possible to a certain extent.

In this thesis, I intend to explore and make a study on advertising translation and the choices of the strategies of advertising translation. In this way, this thesis is help to improve advertising translation. This thesis includes the studies on the basic knowledge of advertising, the features of advertising language, pun, choices of strategies of advertising translation, and so on. This thesis is divided into three chapters. Chapter two is a brief introduction to English advertising.Chapter three deals with the basic knowledge of pun, its application and function from four aspects, homophonic pun, homographic pun,grammatical pun, idiomatic pun. Chapter four concentrates on the translation of pun in advertising English. And I hope that this study opens a new view in studying advertising translation and can provide a guiding theory to translation practices.

2. A Brief Introduction to Advertising

2.1 Definition. The definition of advertising by AMA (American Marketing Association) is: “Advertising is the non-personal com-munication usually paid for and usually persuasive in nature about products, services of ideas by identified sponsors through various media.(Attridge,D.1988)” It is a device to arouse consumers’ attention to a commodity and induce them to use it. In modern age, people find them-selves surrounded by various advertisements each day. We find advertisement of all kinds everywhere, for example, large electric screens on top of high buildings and along main streets, colorful pictures painted on buses, beautiful pamphlets sent to every house, literal advertisements glutting on newspaper; phonic advertisements jammed between TV programs and radio broadcasts, etc. Advertising also exists on billboards along the freeway, in subway and train stations, on benches at bus stops, and on the frames around car license plates. In shopping malls, there are prominent logos on designer clothes, moviego-errs regularly view advertisements for local restaurants, hairsalons, and so on, and live sporting and cultural events often include signage, logos,products, and related information about the event sponsors. The pervasiveness of advertising and its creative elements are designed to cause viewers to take note.

2.2 Functions. The primary objective of advertising is to persuade,it may achieve this objective in many different ways. An important function of advertising is the identification function, that is, to identify a product and differentiate it from others; this creates an awareness of the product and provides a basis for consumers to choose the advertised product over other products. Another function of advertising is to communicate information about the product, its attributes, and its location of sale; this is the information function. The third function of advertising is to induce consumers to try new products and to suggest reuse of the product as well as new uses; this is the persuasion function.

The identification function of advertising includes the ability of advertising to differentiate a product so that it has its own unique identity or personality. One famous example of this is found in the long-running advertising for Ivory Soap. In the late 1800s, a soap maker at Procter and Gamble left his machine running during his lunch period and returned to find a whipped soap that, when made into bars, floated.The company decided to capitalize on this mistake by advertising Ivory Soap with the phrase “It Floats.” This characteristic of Ivory Soap served to uniquely identify it and differentiate it from other bars of soap.

The information function of advertising can also be found in advertising for Ivory Soap. For more than one hundred years,advertisements for Ivory Soap have focused on such product characteristics as purity of ingredients, child care, and soft skin. These characteristics, in turn, were often related to key benefits that could be obtained from using Ivory Soap. Thus, various advertisements emphasized “That Ivory Look,” which focused on the relationships between product characteristics and the benefits of obtaining a fresh and healthy appearance.

The third and most important function of advertising, persuasion, is also evident in the long-running Ivory Soap advertising campaigns. The advertiser, Procter and Gamble, has linked Ivory Soap with obtaining benefits that are important to customers: a fresh and healthy appearance for women, a mild, nonirritating method for bathing babies, and a novelty for children in the tub (since it floats). The benefits of the product suggest reasons to buy and use Ivory Soap and thus provide a basis for persuading consumers. Different benefits are important to different customers. Thus, to realize its full potential as a persuasive tool,advertising must often be tailored to emphasize those benefits that are important and meaningful for a particular type of customer or a particular use of the product.

2.3 Rhetorical Devices. Rhetorical devices are variations of literal or ordinary form of expressions. Their use is to make the thought more striking and effective, for they have the power to vivify and illustrate. A fresh, apt rhetorical device appeals to the imagination, creates mental pictures and makes the speech or writing vivid, impressive and interesting. For this reason, advertisers often use various rhetorical devices to increase the readability and appeal of an advertisement and to arouse consumers’ interest of buying the product, among which the rhetoric of pun is the most popular and effective one.

Pun is a play on words, sometimes on different senses of the same word and sometimes on the similar sense or sound of different words.

According to “Webster’s Third New International Dictionary”,the pun is “a humorous meanings of a word in such a way as to suggest different meanings or application of words having the same sound or nearly the same sound but different meanings: a play on words”. The following is an example:

You will go nuts for the nuts you get in Nux. –Nux nuts

Ask for More. –More Cigarette

3. Pun in Advertising English

3.1 Definition of Pun. The word “pun” springs from the Latin word“paronomasia” with the meaning of “to call by different name”, which reveals the central of pun: it involves dissimilar meaning linked to similar forms. Pun can reply on the assumed equivalency of multiple similar horse words (homonymy), of different shades of meaning of one word (polysemy), or of a literal meaning with metaphor.

Puns are frequently employed in literary works to transfer a rich implication or to encourage readers to think more about the plot and the characters. That’s why you can’t escape puns from classic literary work to news headlines and advertising slogans.

3.2 The Application of Pun in English Advertising. There are many kinds of puns exist in English advertisements. In this paper, four major types of them to be talked, namely homophonic puns, homographic pun,grammatical pun and idiom pun.

3.2.1 Homophonic Pun. Homophonic means two or more words are of the similar or same sound.

Because “There exist no information channels of bilingual conversion at the sound level” the partial sound puns are always seen in the daily life. It concludes close sound pun and the same sound pun.

3.2.2 Homographic Pun.Homographic is one of important means to create puns. Easily know from its name, homographic pun is a pun created by the homographic of a word. For example:

Spoil yourself and not your figure.

尽情大吃，不增体重。(Liu Rongzheng, 2002:5)

This is the ad title of Weight-Watcher ice-cream, and this ice-cream is produced for dieter particular. Pun exists not only in the brand tag of product; the “spoil” in the title is also a pun. The meaning of “spoil oneself” is “to one’s heart’s content” (尽兴), but the meaning of “spoil one’s figure” is “someone’ s figure is spoiled” (破坏了体形).This advertisement makes the dieter accept it spontaneously in the easy and humorous mood by homographic pun and make them buy the product.

3.2.3 Grammatical Pun. English words, especially phrasal verbs have very flexible collocations. In certain collocations, the meaning of a particular verb can be broadened in a certain way of course; verbs vary from one to another in collocation range. For example “lost game and lost temper” are two relatively fixed collocations; while “press grape and press cloth” are free lexical phrases which means the two components in each phrase are not closely bound and can appear together with other words. No matter fixed or free lexical collocations,they both lie on the large semantic capacity of English words (verbs),which enable them to combine with other different lexical elements and thus create two or more different phrases having one word in common that make pun by repeating the word in common.

Puns can also be created by different understanding of a same word.As the following example goes:

Double delicious, Double your pleasure.

双倍地香甜，双倍地开心。 (Liu Rongzheng, 2002:5)

Obviously this advertisement realizes the pun meaning by the word of “double”. The first double is an adverb, decorates “delicious”; the latter is a verb, “pleasure” is an object, this word game plays quite appropriately.

3.2.4 Idiomatic Pun. Idioms are fixed phrases, and generally speaking they are stable. However, nothing is absolute and sometimes they could be altered to meet the need of communication. In rhetoric,idioms can be changed through replacement, expansion, omission and hyperbaton. One example is provided:

On the advertisement of a swimming pool where people can have sunbath: “We leave no stern intoned”. (Leave no stone unturned)(Xiongyao, 2005)

“Stone” and “unturned” in the original idiom are replaced by “stern(臀部) ” and “intoned” [as a verb, “tone” means “to improve the strength and firmness of your skin or muscles”; here “intoned” is coined by the writer and means “not to be basked by the sun(未被太阳晒到)”]：When translating these three sentences into Chinese, the translators could just put them like: 一个提供日光浴的游泳池广告上写着：“我们保证您的每一寸肌肤都能享受到阳光的温暖。”

3.3 The Use of Pun in English Advertising. According to the theory of Peter Newmark, advertising belongs to the vocative text, as the main purpose is to sell the products.(Peter Newmark,2001:40) In order to gain the perfect effect, the advertisers prefer to use puns. In the following, we will take about why puns are so popularly employed in English advertisements.

To begin with, pun is a play on words, which are sounded alike but have different meanings. Because of its humorous effect, the reader will be amused and impressed during the short span in which the reader’s attention could be captured. Michael Newman, who studies on consumer psychology, think highly of humor’s effect in advertising, “Humor is so powerful in advertising because it’s a bridge that links the brand and the consumer.” “Pleasant communications, particularly in advertising, tend to be more ‘soft-sell’”. Thus, the advertisers like it.

For example:

1. I’m More satisfied. (Meng Lin & Zhang Jinghui, 2001:5)

The well-known American More cigarettes have been making best use of a pun in its advertisement. The word “more” has two interpretations: one is “additional number or amount” and the other is“the cigarette brand More”. This advertisement reflects the intelligence and humor of the adman.

Furthermore, it is well-known that advertising space and time are limited and costly. Puns are highly economical. “Two meanings at the price of one are what the advertisers expect.” Economical form with abundant information, punning is favored by advertisers. “The pun conserves energy, space and time.”

2. Make Time For Time. (Hung Yingqiu, 2005:8)

The Time magazine made this advertisement for its own promotion.Homonym is adopted. As is easily seen, the word “time” is used twice and two meanings are expressed-the first “time” is “时间”in Chinese and the second is the name of the magazine. This advertisement which calls upon the people to find time to read the magazine is most impressive due to its use of the pun that not only saves space, but also makes it easy to remember.

Last but not the least, a pun in advertisements can also be used to transmit that are not so comfortable or convenient for advertisers to utter out overtly. Thus a pun turns out to be a useful and effective device in avoiding taboo and indecency.

4. Translation of Pun in Advertising English

4.1 Barriers of Translating Pun. The translation of puns is always considered to be extremely difficult. Many people even consider puns as“untranslatable”. Since there have much difference between Chinese and English, for a translator, it becomes almost impossible to find equivalence both in sound and in meaning in the target language. In translating an English homophonic pun into Chinese, there exists a structural barrier. A homophonic pun is a mere coincidence in sound.But when the coincidence is translated into Chinese, it will no longer be a coincidence. It may not be a pun any more. As a result, the original humor or wit in the pun is nowhere to be seen. In translating an English homographic pun, translators will inevitably meet semantic barriers,because there are few expressions, which have the same conceptual and associative meanings both in English and in Chinese. The barrier in translation exists as long as linguistic and cultural differences. However,there is no source text that is absolutely untranslatable. We should try to convert untranslatability into translatability, or make compensation in translation. In a word, the translation of English puns is possible to a certain extent.

4.1.1 Linguistic Barrier. Linguistic barrier occurs when the linguistic form has a function beyond that of conveying factual relationships and is therefore a constituent part of the functional equivalence to be achieved. Linguistic is absolutely impossible to overcome because it is caused by linguistic differences itself. Linguistic barrier includes structural barriers and semantic barriers.

Structural barriers may occur when we translate an English homophonic pun into Chinese. A homophonic pun is a mere coincidence of two contents in sound. But when the coincidence is rendered into Chinese, it will no longer be a coincidence. That is to say, it will not be a pun any more. As a result, the original wit in the pun is nowhere to be seen. One example is provided:

-A: What do lawyers do after their death? (Ma Hongjun, 2000:34)

-B: They lie still.

Translation: 甲：那个律师死后还能干什么？

乙：躺着说鬼话。

In this short dialogue, “lie” and “still” create double puns. There are two meanings in the second sentence. The conceptual meaning is“after death they’re lying there silently”, and the associative meaning is“they’re still telling lies after death”. Though the translation expresses the two meanings, the style in the original version can hardly be retained.

Most of the common words in English are polysemic. “A glance at any English dictionary will give you an idea of how frequent polysemy is. One-meaning words (monosemic words) are very rare, …It may be said that polysemy is the rule and monosemy is the exception.” But most of the disyllabic words that make up most of the Chinese vocabulary are monosemic. Thus the expressions, which have the same conceptual and associative meanings both in English and in Chinese, are rare. This leads to the fact that translators will inevitably meet semantic barriers in translating homographic puns. One example is provided:

A professor tapped on his desk and shouted:

-“Gentleman-Order!

The entire class yelled: “Bear!”

Translation: 一位教授敲着桌子喊道：“先生们，安静！”

全体一致回答：“啤酒！”

In this case, the pun is triggered by the word “order”, which is a polysemic word. In professor’s words, “order” means “quiet”(in Chinese“安静”), while the whole class understand it as “to request someone to supply” (in Chinese“点酒，点菜”), thus forms the humor in this context. However, there id no word that can bear both meanings of“安静”and“点酒，点菜”in Chinese. So in the translation, we can hardly feel the humor, but confused.

4.1.2 Cultural Barrier. As we all know, language is the carrier of culture and the rendering of meaning can not avoid the influence of the underlying cultural factors. Therefore, another important factor hampering the rendering of pun is that pun is connected to the culture.

“衣食住行，有龙则灵。”(China Construction Bank) (Qin Xiubai,1994)

If we translate“龙”into “dragon”, then few foreigners will use this kind of card because dragon is regarded as a horrible monster in western culture. When we translate ads, we have to take into consideration of the elements of culture. Therefore, we should avoid using the word“dragon” in this ad and we may translate in this way:

“Long Card makes daily necessities a piece of cake.”

4.2 Strategies for Translating Pun in English Advertising. Based on the above analysis, we can see that although English puns are hard to translate, it does exist a certain translatability extent. Therefore,translators explore many ways to deal with this translation. In summary,it can be divided into 3 types: literal translation, free translation,annotated translation.

4.2.1 Literal Translation. Literal translation, generally speaking,refers to the original version is translated literally or directly into the target language, the same punny meanings are retained in the version.

Here goes an advertisement:

In Honghu day is going to break. (Zhang Aiping, 1995:3)

洪湖就要天亮了。

Here “day is going to break” means “first light that appears just when the sun is about to rise above the horizon; daybreak”. This sentence hides another meaning, “The Revolution is going to accomplish”. Both in English and Chinese version, this sentence contain two levels of meanings. However, the readers can immediately read out the double meanings.

4.2.2 Free Translation. Sometimes, for social and cultural difference between English and Chinese, the translators unable to use literal translation but to use free translation. However, using free translation only can render the general meaning of the original version.The humor, wit, satire or even complicated feelings that are expressed uniquely by the use of puns may not be fully conveyed. For example:

Spoil yourself and not your figure: 尽心地吃吧，别担心体重。

The phrase “spoil oneself” means “enjoy oneself to heart’s content”,while “spoil one’s figure” means “make a damage on one’s figure”. In this ad, the punny word is “spoil”, the advertiser employs the homographic pun to persuade the Ice-Cream lover to eat to their heart content without worrying about their weight. It achieves a good effect.

4.2.3 Annotated Translation. Pun translation has its limitations; it is no doubt that a translator will meet obstacles, more or less, in both language and culture in translating. In such cases, if he cannot make them clear, a translator may resort to other translation techniques, such as, annotation.

Annotation in translation makes the punny sense of the original easy to see and easy to understand. And it offers a chance for the reader to appreciate the beauty of the source language. However, adopting annotation in translation is always the last choice, for the humor in the original version may not be completely converted in the translated version.

For example:

-Why is the figure nine like a peacock?

-It’s nothing without its tail.

-为什么说“9”像只孔雀？

-因为它没了尾巴什么都不是。（注：“9”没了尾巴就成了“0”）

It is an interesting riddle, however, without the annotation, the reader will be confused.

Pun is one of the common rhetorical figures in English. It is widely used in our daily life. The use of English pun can enrich the expression of language and prompt people to appreciate the beauty of language. A pun often has double meanings, one is the surface meaning, the other is the implied meaning, and the implied meaning is often what the author intends to tell us. Therefore, to understand and translate English pun is very difficult. As an English learner, we must learn the characteristics of English pun, only when we master the features of English pun can we use it easily and effectively. In translation of English pun, we must adopt the flexible technique, and try our best to convert the untranslatability into translatability.

5. Conclusion

Though advertising translation appears as a new field of study, this type of intercultural communication starts to arouse interests of translation theorists and advertising agents. First of all, the translator must be fully aware of the intricacies of the original, intricacies to which an understanding of advertising and its langue, with its unique style, is central. In this thesis, the author first devotes herself into the field of advertising and advertising language in great detail. As advertising translation is different from literary translation because of the characteristic of communication. In literary translation, the debate is mainly centered on the fidelity of the target text to the source text and source culture. The debate on whether the translation shall be represented as reproduction of the source language and source culture,or shall it is adapted to the target language and the target culture, never ceases. And criteria as to the evaluation of the quality of translation remain versatile. However it is much simpler in advertising translation.

To sum up, in translation of advertising, translators should take into consideration of the readability of the target text and acceptability of the intended readers. In other words, the process focuses on the target text and is reader-oriented, thus it leaves more space for translators’ creative work. Due to linguistic and cultural differences, equivalent transfer of language and information is impossible. Sometimes there are gaps in vocabulary, concepts, customs, etc. and conflicts in thought patterns,aesthetic values, moral standards, etc. In translation practice, we could make use of proper means to adjust the original text to meet the needs in particular translation situations. A translator should also avoid the interference of hisher native language and arrange the sentences in accordance with the target thought pattern.

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论英语广告中双关语的翻译

孔婷
（西北民族大学外国语学院 甘肃兰州 730030）

英语双关语是一种表现力极强的修辞手段，巧妙的双关语能使语言含蓄、幽默、生动、机智，起到旁敲侧击，借题发挥的作用，因此，双关语常常在广告语言中得以大量应用。广告制作者们挖空心思地追求新的创意，使得双关语在广告中的运用技巧更加纷繁复杂，使得对双关语的翻译显得更加棘手。本文拟从谐音双关和语义双关两方面对双关语在广告英语中的运用进行阐述，同时探讨其翻译方法。希望能借助本文帮助人们更好地理解英语广告双关语的运用和翻译，以满足各自的商业需求或达到商业目的。

广告英语；双关语；翻译

孔婷（1987-），女，山东曲阜人，西北民族大学外国语学院2010级硕士，研究方向：课程语教学论英语方向。

2011-02-06

Punning is one of the most common rhetorical devices used in English advertisements. It not only makes the advertisement language succinct, vivid and humor, but also let the people pay more attention to the advertisement and remember it easily. It is a good way to use puns in advertisement language if advertisements want to gain good influence. The translation of puns in advertisements is often considered to be very difficult. The translator must keep both the double meaning of a pun and the style of the advertisement in mind. My thesis mainly deals with two kinds of puns(homophone, homograph) and three methods of translating puns in English advertisements. The purpose of this thesis is to help people get correct understanding of puns and the translations in English advertisements.

advertising English; pun; translation