In many languages, Alliteration has been commonly used, especially in poetry. And it is also commonly adopted in English ads .here are more examples about it. Next one is a advertisement for a defatted milk brand, which is:“ Skim milk does not come from skinny cows.”

It is very funny expressions. Skinny usually means Very thin sometimes used as an exaggeration to refer to someone is so thin having nothing left but skin. Here “skim milk” means degreased milk. In order to keep the humorous effect as the original version, so the Chinese translation is better be “脱脂奶并不来自于脱脂牛”.here “脱脂牛”could be easily understood by Chinese people as skinny even unhealthy cows.

Another example is the ad slogan of a Travel Agency called Cosmo, which is “As You Sow, So You Shall Reap”. It is similar to an old saying of English “As we sow, so shall we reap” or “We reap what we sow”, which could be translated into Chinese as “种瓜得瓜,种豆得豆”. This agency tries to manifest their determination offering their best services to their clients and their willing to gain trust from their customers by their hard works.

There are a lot of slogans originated from English proverbs. For example, “A Mars a day keeps you work, rest and play “is very familiar to most of the consumers in European and American consumers since it comes from two English proverbs “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” and “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. The ad writer creates a new sentence out of the combination of the two phrases. then it could be translated into“一天一块火星巧克力,精神充沛休息好。”

I have collected a lot of ad discourse; many of them are quite amusing and interesting. Some of them only have one word in total, which makes the translation more difficult and also more challenging for the translator. For example the slogan of American United Airline only has one word “Rising”, which could be translated into Chinese as “飞”. But it might remind Chinese people a kite or a bird, rather than the planes or the company itself. So I believe it would be better to translate those one-word slogans by telling what they are truly about. There are some Examples listed below:

Rising.—— American United Airline.

腾飞——美国联合航空公司

True.——Budweiser.

真实感受。——百威啤酒

Finger-Licking good——KFC.

吮指回味,其乐无穷。——肯德基

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