A Semiopragmatic Study of Humorous Advertisements with Reference to Translation

Abstract

This paper sets out to investigate the concepts of ' text' and ' image' employed in ' humorous advertisements ' found in newspapers or magazines and the translations of such discourse genres .A semiopragmatic approach is adopted to scrutinize the subject matter in question . Five advertisements are selected to be the corpus of the study. Proposed renditions are suggested in accordance with the results of the semiopragmatic analysis. It is found that when texts are used to direct the readers' attention to the picture, or when pictures are used to direct the readers' attention to a specific written message, the text-image relationship is predominantly a pragmatic one; and in both cases the relationship between text and picture is an indexical one (semiotic) .It is also found that implicatures : a special kind of pragmatic inferences, have been kept by the translator in his rendition leaving the reader to interpret the implicit meaning of the humorous advertisement depending on experience or background knowledge.