Intersemiotic Translation Study on E-commerce Advertisements under Non-Verbal Communication: An Analysis of the Apparel Campaigns on Alibaba International Website

Abstract

With the development of economic globalization, E-commerce advertising has become a good way for enterprises to expand their international market, and people tend to be more likely to go shopping online especially under the influence of COVID-19. E-commerce platforms often provide verbal and nonverbal signs as they are normally designed to be used across different countries and cultures. The discursive nature of E-commerce advertising always needs some translation of meanings when enterprises want to sell products worldwide, which thus offer significant opportunities to bring light on intersemiotic translation of multimodal E-commerce advertisements under the guidance of nonverbal communication. This article takes the apparel advertising campaigns in Alibaba International Website as research target and mainly focusing on the nonverbal signs from four categories: body language, paralanguage, object language and environmental language in order to study how did nonverbal signs been handled in advertising, how the nonverbal signs interact with verbal signs to realize nonverbal communication functions and what’s the meaning of nonverbal communication for intersemiotic translation in improving the quality of E-commerce advertisements to fulfill online marketing communication purposes.