Translating Advertising
Posted by transubstantiation on November 16, 2006
Depending on the type of advertising in question one can maintain that the translation of advertising is rather like the translation of poetry. When one translates advertising slogans every single word carries enormous weight. In fact for many translators the interpretation of advertising slogans is more difficult, time-consuming and stressful than working with poetic literature.
The greatest burden is the fact that the translator usually finds him- or herself working for a company large enough to be able to advertise or a PR firm that represents that company. Whatever the intricacies, a great deal of money is involved and a great deal of responsibility rests on the successful translation of the advertisement.
Not only does the translator have to render the slogan from one culture into another, but also tailor the text to a particular audience whilst also considering the product that is being advertised. There is absolutely no room for error. The translator becomes a PR specialist and copywriter who is solely responsible for the success or failure of a advertising campaign.
November 16, 2006 at 9:58 am
Translating advertising is a very difficult job. SOmetimes the advertisement is not translatable. In one of the car advertisements you had a word “babe” and in the polish one “mały”. These both words do not carry the same massage thus the english one is more persuasive. Some commercials are not translated, for instance, Nike`s slogan “JUST DO IT” which is left in english because there is no perfect equivalent for it. Nowadays, more and more slogans are left untranslated, most of the times these are car commercials. IS it better to leave them like that? DO people sometimes understand them when they do not know english? And most of the time, commercials should be changed because there is no cultural equivalent in a specific country.
November 16, 2006 at 11:19 am
Concerning the Nike advertisement and the equivalence issue: there are NO perfect equivalents only shades of interpretation and attempts are equivalence. The question of whether it is better to leave certain slogans untranslated is a complicated one. However, in a multi-lingual society perhaps it is not the problem it once was. On the other hand, will an English slogan be received by an English audience in the same way that a Polish audience might perceive it?
November 16, 2006 at 7:01 pm
I agree with my predecessor, in a multi-lingual society leaving some advertising slogans untraslated is not the problem it once was. A good example of that is McDonald’s slogan “I’m loving it” which was not translated into Polish, perhaps it was too difficult to do so. Moreover, the language of advertising is extremely hard for translator to work on and people who deal with those texts are my idols;)
November 16, 2006 at 10:10 pm
Translating advertising slogans totally differs from translating other types of texts (no matter what they are). I believe it is so because it’s a word play and all possible grammar rules and structures are very often broken. Hence, I agree that it’s similar to translating poetry. Therefore, a translator must be a really skilled person and also have the “gift” for swopping some pieces of one culture with another, which seems to be the crucial issue in translation.
November 17, 2006 at 6:37 am
The “gift” that is spoken of here is hard to pinpoint. Perhaps there is some abstract concept/phenomenon which is a “gift for translation”, but what is more likely is that there is #experience# and #hard work#.
November 17, 2006 at 9:27 pm
I agree with you that translating advertising slogans is a really difficult job. In my opinion, there is something besides experience and hard work needed to cope with such a task. Maybe ii’s imagination… I like the comparison between translating advertising and poetry. In both cases “every single word carries enormous weight”. The translator is responsible for the text he or she translates. In the case of translating advertising slogans the effect of his/her work can more or less be measured by people’s interest in the product.
November 18, 2006 at 10:36 am
The interesting question is… is translating advertising #the same as# or #different from# translating poetry?
November 19, 2006 at 8:59 pm
I think the answer might be quite simple. Since nothing is the same and all kinds of texts differ from each other, these two “genres” cannot be the same. But as far as the similar difficulty in translating advertising and translating poetry is concerned, I believe we can say that they are comparable. I suppose the answer lies in the middle. It’s neither the same nor different. It’s similar.
November 20, 2006 at 6:43 pm
Obviously the two genres are very different, but one cannot fail to notice the similarities between the two…
December 28, 2006 at 10:26 pm
I agree that translation of advertisements can be compared to the translation of poetry. They both require a lot of hard work and are time-consuming. There are many ‘ideas’ that do not have equivalents in various cultures. But still, there are many slogans that remain unchanged in the TL and they do not seem to be anything strange nowadays. In fact, the aim of advertisemsnts is to catch peoples’ attention…
December 30, 2006 at 12:32 pm
Precisely, our role is to catch peoples’ attention, so the function of these texts are very different from the functions of other texts.
January 2, 2007 at 1:47 pm
There is a certain similarity between advertising slogans and poetry. They are both more difficult to translate than prose and demand more creativity, intelligence and language fluency from the translator.
August 26, 2007 at 4:50 pm
[...] by transub on August 26th, 2007 As we have seen in a previous post (click here), within the language of advertising the translator is often bound by more factors than when [...]