Faithfulness implies that the information conveyed by the translation version should accord with that conveyed by the original one. As far as requirements of business English are concerned, translators need to master adequate professional business knowledge to convey the original information. To make the meaning faithful, we have to utilize the non-equivalence theory which means we need to do free translation instead of literal translation.
Advertisements are notorious for their multiple meanings. Usually they are very linguistic-specific and culture-specific and thus give the translators a big headache to find the appropriate words not only beautiful but also faithful. Most of the time we cannot find the equivalent word to perfect the translation. “Finger-licking good” is a famous KFC slogan. We certainly cannot translate it literally into “舔手指好”, but through analyzing we could translate that into correct Chinese“有了肯德基，生活好滋味” which is of great faithfulness as to its original meaning. However, we add more content in the advertisement slogan. The famous car brand Mitsubishi takes “Not all cars are created equal” as its slogan. When we see that for the first time it’s easy to refer to the sentence originated from I have a dream “all man are created equal”, but we cannot literally translate the advertisement into Chinese when brought to China’s
market.
Finally, people translate that into“并非所有的汽车都有相同的品质” which can be accepted by the audience and potential customers. Equal is an adverb but we translate that into a noun “品质” which is non-equivalent. Only in this way can we achieve the communicative function and meet the sales expectations of the advertisers at the same time. The concrete information needs to be translated correctly and appropriately avoiding any omissions of related details. On the contrary, we add more content to make it faithful.
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