免费英语论文范文(12)
3. 1 Preservation
For those advertisements that mainly appeal to emotions, e.g. texts abundant with
rhetorical devices such as pun, the persuasive power lies in the successful conveyance of the rich meaning in these rhetorical devices. Preservation is one of the effective ways to represent the strength of the original, and it is also one of the often-employed approaches available to the translator, but it should be adopted on the condition that there is a large degree of overlap in both the source language and the target language in terms of linguistic features and the cognitive environment of the source language and the target language reader on the subject to be translated, so that by doing so it neither causes clash in the target language culture nor misleads the reader when he/she processes it and therefore the original and the translated closely resemble each other, and if possible have the same effects on the reader. Such linguistic features may be morphologic, phonetic, syntactic and semantic, etc., which still preserve(as much as possible)the communicative clues of the original,or resemblance in linguistic properties. Eg. An Apple for everybody keeps worries away.
Version A: 电脑选苹果，烦恼远离我。
Version B: 天天有苹果，烦恼远离我。[5]
In this advertisement of a computer, the word “apple” has two meanings: one refers to the fruit “apple” and the other “the computer brand”. At first sight, the reader knows that the advertisement comes from the saying “An apple a day keeps a doctor away”, which is often rendered as “一日一苹果，医生远离我”. Relevance Theory tells us that the translated has to resemble the original closely enough in relevant aspects. Guided by the principle of optimal relevance,we know that the translator has to ensure that the reader can recognize the intention of the advertiser to entertain the reader. Meanwhile, taking the reader’s cognitive environment into account,we know that the western saying “an apple a day is a healthy way of life” and it is familiar to the reader. So along this line of thinking, we think that in “Version A” the pun in the original advertisement is not preserved and hence the sense of humor conveyed by it gets lost; besides the expression “电脑选苹果” sounds too direct whereas “Version B” effectively preserves the pun in the original, i.e. the two layers of meaning in the original are both conveyed. Besides, it also retains the form of the original. In terms of meaning, such implicatures in the original as“having an apple keeps one healthy”，“having an apple helps one get his work done” and “having an apple makes one efficient” can also be derived from it, therefore “Version B” is a better translation.
