Abstract: As the trend of economic globalization boosts increasingly, the development of business gets prosperous contemporarily and therefore commercials have become one of the indispensable procedures in international marketing. As a forceful tool of product marketing which is concise, intuitive, vivid and easy to be remembered, commercials have been implied widely from corner to corner and also has a great impact on society. Whereas in the course of commercials translation, some translators’ ignorance of differences in culture, customs and value etc. which often leads to pragmatic failures in commercials. English and Chinese are two languages that have been extensively used. Therefore the pragmatic failures and strategies in commercial translations are worth studying. This thesis takes commercial translations between English and Chinese as research projects; it expounds systematically aims and principles of commercials; meanwhile it gives examples to analyze pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic failures, offers strategies about how to avoid pragmatic failures on the basis of adaptation and skopos theory. These can help reduce and avoid pragmatic mistakes, therefore to convey commercials’ information more exactly and vividly.
Key words: commercials translation; pragmatic failures; linguistics; adaptation; skopos theory
