Translation Constraints and Conventions of Advertising Texts With reference to English-Arabic translation

Abstract

This study investigates the conventions and constraints involved in the process of translating advertising texts from English into Arabic. It starts by exploring the current conventions and techniques of advertising in the Arab World. A number of Arabic advertisements chosen from various Arabic magazines is analysed in order to identify dominant forms and conventions, and the impact of advertisements on women`s lives. The analysis identifies a range of interesting techniques used in Arabic advertising today, such as switching between Standard and Colloquial Arabic, the use of certain rhetorical devices such as parallelism, the use of congratulatory settings, testimonials and the mixing of genres. A model for analysis is then established by presenting and discussing different approaches. The proposed model is applied to original English and Arabic advertisements in order to show how the various elements of the model play a role in delivering advertising messages. Finally, the model is applied to English advertisements and their Arabic translations in order to investigate the strategies and constraints involved in the process. The analysis reveals that certain strategies are used frequently by translators or localisers in the Arab World. These include: covering the bodies of semi-naked female models or replacing them or the contexts they appear in with more local elements, adding or underlining elements of newness or originality in the Arabic version, transliterating brand names, modifying headings and slogans or creating new ones. The study further suggests that there are certain marketing constraints which motivate the translator or localiser to abandon or radically modify the format of the source text. These constraints include the publishing of English advertisements in different formats which are not easily available in the Arabic context, and the need to include local details in the Arabic versions which are not provided and not related to the English texts