A Study on English-Vietnamese Translation of Advertising Slogans From the Perspective of Newmark’s Translation Methods

This study aims to investigate the translation of advertising slogans from English to Vietnamese from the perspective of eight translation methods proposed by Newmark (1988). To realize this objective, the study uses two research methods of discourse analysis and translation comparative. The former is employed to analyse the linguistic components used in the original text and the translated one while the latter is used to identify the similarities and differences between the two texts so as to identify what translation method is used in a particular slogan translation. 60 pairs of English and Vietnamese advertising slogans collected randomly from different means of media for different kinds of products are used as the research sample. The research findings illustrate that of the eight methods proposed by Newmark, four are found in the translation of advertising slogans from English to Vietnamese, including Faithful translation, Semantic translation, Communicative translation and Free translation. Among these methods, Free translation is the most commonly-used, followed by Communicative translation, then Faithful translation and Semantic translation. The choice of a particular method for a slogan translation depends on the linguistic characteristics of the original slogan, including its lexical features, sentence structure, social and psychological features and rhetorical features. These findings partly go in line with earlier studies by Newmark and other scholars while some new findings are identified as the new contributions of this study to the research topic.