Pragmatics and Translation in the Use of English Words in Banner Advertising on Portal Sites

In modern socity, online communication plays a vital role in social interaction of communicities. It is so common for online users to see display advertisements online while surting the Net. Specifically, most web banners diaplayed on portral sites consist of words, phrase, and sentences. Considering that the primary purpose of adversiting is persuation, the advertisement such as web banners is an examplary case to show the interaction among pragmatics, translation and advertising because the linguistic expressions employed in the banners represent its pragmatic use, leading to persuation and functioning as a communicative tool for the smooth communication between source text producers (adversisers) and target audience (online users). This can be part of the so-called translation process. In particular, we can easily witness the use of English words in web banners. Thus, this paper looks at web banners displayed on major four portal sites-Naver, Daum, Nate, and Zum, giving a special attention to the content contained in the web banners as well as the use of English words. As s result, we found that the frequencies of English words in each portal site were higher when the advertised products were targeting young online users, whereas the frequencies were lower when the users are older group than young people. The finding supports the prgramatic perspective that linguistic expressions are understood in social contexts and shows the so-called translation process which involves a shift from semantic meaning of words to their pragmatic use. Finally, we can conclude that the interaction is possible when we have the framework where translation, pragmatics, and advertising are all communitative components for social interaction within social contexts.