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3 Definition and Relation of Parody and Memetics 4
3.1 Definition of Parody 4
3.2 Definition and Origin of Memetics 5
3.3 Relation between Parody and Memetics 6
4 The Application of Parody in AT on Memetics 8
4.1 Difficulties of Advertisement Translation 8
4.2 Diversity of Parody in Advertisement Translation 9
4.2.1 Famous Idioms and Proverbs 9
4.2.2 Well-known Poems and Songs 11
4.2.3 Popular Couplets and Quotations 13
5 The suggestions for the application of parody in AT 15
5.1 Cultural Difference 15
5.2 Suitable Conditions 16
5.3 Practical Correlation 16
5.4 Anti-Hackneyed Expressions 17
6 Conclusion 18
Bibliography 20
1 Introduction
In the context of globalization, the international business becomes more and more frequent and important, therefore, thousands upon thousands of advertisements have sweepingly penetrated people’s daily life. Due to this trend, advertising translation (AT) is doomed to play an increasingly significant role in pressing ahead the prosperity of the business markets all over the world.
Parody, one of the translation strategies, is now heatedly discussed and researched in perse academic fields, because parody makes the translation version filled with wisdom, humor, and vividness, which deeply impress people and finally lead to the desire of the consumption. The choice of integrating the parody into AT is based on the consideration that imitations of the famous sayings and proverbs, well-known poems and songs, familiar slangs and idioms, and popular couplets and quotations which lay a cultural background of the advertisements, inducing people’s imagination, inspiring people’s emotion, and achieving the sales targets in the end.
Inspired by the Memetics generated from Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (1976) and Blackmore’s The Meme Machine (1999), the word or the language itself is considered as a kind of linguistic meme. Therefore, human being’ mind is like the data-source of linguistic memes, full of the possibility to copy, imitate, and create. Also, the strong memes can always be easily caught, remembered and spread by people in their daily life. The transmissions of linguistic meme, to some extent, acquire the similar function with the parody in the advertising translation. So, this thesis will also combine the Memetics with parody.
Adopting Memetics as its framework, the present paper will provide theoretical guide for the application of parody in AT, with the help of which the translation of the advertisements can better imitate the original information and improve its effectiveness. The significance of the study lays in the establishment of a systematic theoretical framework of parody in AT which increases the possibility for an ad to be popular on a world-wide scale.
2 Literature review
Previously, a great number of researchers and experts, both domestic and foreign, have studied on advertising translation from various perspectives, although they were not systematic in the past. This part will spell out the evolution of AT theory from foreign to domestic. Due to the lack of foreign resources, domestic part will be dwelt upon.
2.1 Researches of AT in Foreign Countries
As more and more attention has been paid to the translation of the context of advertisement, Pierre Hurbin (1972) first considered the possibility of translating the language of advertising in the journal Babel. In 1984, functional theories discussed advertising texts as a distinct kind of text. Nord (1991:5), regarded translation as intercultural communication, which inspired researches to focus on the strategy of adaptation. Ho (2004), through the analyses of advertising cases, noticed that some intentional-betrayal translations conducted by some translators often resulted in excellent successes. So the phenomenon of parody stimulates the further study of AT, and shed great enlightenment on Chinese scholars.