Investigating the strategies used for translating English advertisement slogans into Arabic.

Abstract

This work deals with the translation of a non-literary text within the special field of marketing. It investigates the translation strategies used in a recent orientation in the translation field, which is advertisements translation. This study aims to fill a gap in the Arabic regarding the translation of advertisements. It also aims to provide some hints and guidelines for translation students and future translators. The translation of advertisements seems to pose a number of difficulties because of its multifunctional nature (linguistic, commercial or promotional). That is why we hypothesised that “the oblique translation” strategies, namely adaptation, would be the most adopted strategies to render these elements. It is also hypothesised that if the English advertising slogans were translated literally, they would lose their verbal strength, which may result in unappealing and non influencial versions. Moreover, it is hypothesized that second year Master students at the Translation and the English Departments, at Mentouri University -Constantine 1- are unfamiliar with such a translation. So, to achieve these objectives and to test the hypotheses, the data is gathered through collecting English advertisement slogans (comparable components) along with their Arabic counterparts (parallel components). The data is collected from different television channels (English and Arabic) and some magazines to undertake a qualitative and a quantitative analysis. Furthermore, a test and a questionnaire are administered to both informants to assess their ability to translate such slogans as well as to introduce this translation for them. The results revealed that ‘free translation strategies’ are highly adopted compared to ‘direct strategies’. Furthermore, literal translation can be an effective strategy which implies that Arabic can be used in an expressive way. Moreover, the test and the questionnaire analysis show that students are unable to cope with these slogans’ translation. Therefore, this study recommends an explicit teaching of advertising and its translation in the Translation Departments and its integration as a requirement in academia.