Poeticized use of second-person pronouns in English-Chinese advertisement translation: a questionnaire and eye-tracking study on reader reception

Abstract

Second-person reference frequently appears in advertisement translation. This research explores a poeticized form in English-Chinese translation, namely the ‘adjective + second-person pronoun’ (‘adj. + SP’) structure, and aims to investigate Chinese readers’ reception of this structure. We first conducted an online questionnaire survey to study Chinese readers’ subjective impression of various SP structures. Then, we implemented an eye-tracking experiment to investigate participants’ pupil response. The questionnaire survey shows that the texts with the ‘adj. + SP’ structure are rated higher. The eye-tracking experiment reveals that participants demonstrated higher pupil dilation when reading texts with the ‘adj. + SP’ structure. The results suggest that the poetic use of SPs as in the ‘adj. + SP’ structure can be an effective method of engaging Chinese readers.

Keywords

• Advertisement
• eye-tracking
• poetic
• reception
• second-person pronoun