The transference of poetic quality in the translation of English–Chinese advertisements

Advertisements often use poetic elements to convey messages. This paper reports on a preliminary investigation regarding how poetic elements are used in advertisements and how they are transformed in translation. A theoretical framework is established to elaborate the major functions of poetic advertisements and the categories of poetic elements applied. Poetic advertisements aim to gratify the readers’ aesthetic needs and cause an emotional response. The poetic elements or linguistic devices that are present in poetic advertisements include poetic or rhetorical devices showing regularity in terms of sound or structure and those involving the use of images (understood as mental pictures presented via words). This paper explores the reproduction of such poetic elements in translation; three prominent features are presented based on the analysis of a corpus of 198 English–Chinese poetic advertisements.