Differences in the Transference of Humor and Personification in Advertisement Translation

This study analyses the transference of humor in translating advertising texts and, based on research in a prior study, proposes that the transference of humor is quite flexible in the practice of advertisement translation. The humorous expressions in original texts may be faithfully translated, or deleted, or in some cases humor may be added in translated texts. Compared with such flexible ways of dealing with humor, the translation of personify- cation in our corpus is relatively more faithful. In this paper, we are trying to figure out the implications behind the difference in terms of the treatment of humor and personification in advertisement translation. Similar to the former study, here we will also take the presupposition perspective. When the personification is reproduced faithfully in translations, it can be inferred that translators’ presuppositions about the target audience’s potential perception are the same with those held by the original writers about their targeted readers. This point in turn implies that the original and target cultures are correspondent in those aspects. Similarly, the unfaithful or flexible treatment of humor implies the opposite. In our research we mainly focus on translation between Chinese and English.