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UM E-Theses Collection (澳門大學電子學位論文庫)

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Title

English-Chinese translation of advertisements of cosmetics products from the perspective of Skopos theory

English Abstract

With the development of globalization, freer trade between countries is the result. Trade and cross-broader investment flows have experienced tremendous growth over the past several decades. Consumers around the world enjoy a wider range of selection of products than ever before. Developing countries enjoy among the largest benefits of international trade, particularly China. With its opening-up policies and reform, China’s economy has been enjoying an average annual growth rate of over 10 percent in the past two decades (the World Bank Group: data.worldbank.org, 2014). The Chinese market also creates new business opportunities for all countries around the world. Plenty of foreign products stream into the Chinese market, among which cosmetics is one of the most significant ones (Philip, 2013). In 2012, Cosmetic sales in Mainland China ranked third globally, after the United States and Japan (APCO worldwide, 2013). However, there are not only business opportunities in the Chinese market, but also competitions. As a result, cosmetics advertising has become an effective tool to attract consumers and the translation of advertisements of cosmetics products is crucial. This thesis aims to analyze and compare English-Chinese translation of advertisements of cosmetics products, in the hope of providing some useful insights for the industry. The thesis mainly studies English-Chinese cosmetics advertisement translation from the perspective of Skopos theory. To obtain realistic results, a survey is conducted by questionnaire with a sample size of 50 and targeting women aged between 25 and 45 with regular make-up habit. The study focuses on ii investigating and analyzing the consumption behavior of local mature female consumers as triggered by reading translated advertisements. Examples will be given to demonstrate the strategies of cosmetics’ advertisement translation used to make a given advertisement more effective than others. This thesis attempts to answer two questions related to translation of international cosmetics products: 1) whether there is a direct relationship between translation of advertisements of cosmetics products and purchase behavior; and 2) what are the most appropriate strategies to be adopted in translating of advertisements of cosmetics products? Translators and scholars consider adaptive translation methods the best for advertising translation, which is also found from the adverts in the market that were translated mostly by this method. According to the research results, it has been found that the most appropriate translation strategy/method is adaption, which confirms Reiss’s theory. From the research findings, the second important translation strategy is semantic translation. This result shows that the frequent use of adaptation translation strategy is because it is able to attract target reader’s eye ball, but at the same time customers still would like the translation to remain faithful. The findings show that most of the respondents disagree that they will be convinced to make purchase with beauty content in an advert. Nevertheless, positive relationship was found for the likelihood of translated adverts with beauty wordings to drive respondents’ purchase decision. Respondents appreciated the playful translation wordings and sometimes such elements were able to catch their attention. However, the respondents thought that such wordings were rather clumsy and old-fashioned, thus, would not drive them to iii make purchase. They prefer reading English original text because it is nice and clean and there is no additional unnecessary contents are added. For new brands or new products that respondents are not familiar with, they favor reading translation in Traditional Chinese than Simplified. The result strongly suggests that regional culture should be taken into consideration. The process of localization allows translators to modify advertising messages and cultural differences.

Issue date

2015.

Author

Cheong, Ngan Fun

Faculty

Faculty of Arts and Humanities

Department

Department of English

Degree

M.A.

Subject

English language -- Translating into Chinese

Advertising -- Cosmetics

Supervisor

Venkatesan, Hari

Files In This Item

Full-text (Intranet only)

Location
1/F Zone C
Library URL
991000779059706306