Translation of Advertisements

Introduction

Starting with the early 90s Moldova has become a large outlet for many international companies bringing their new products into our society. Any new product manufactured by a widely known company needs a solid informational support which, as a rule, is provided by advertising. Once brought to a foreign country an advertisement must be adequately translated and it must also be adjusted to the target culture. The Law on Advertising approved by the Parliament of Moldova in 1998 clearly states that any piece of advertising must be translated into the official language of the state.

In order to sell its products the company willing to do that must advertise them in the language which a potential customer can understand, otherwise the company might fail. The failure of a business in today’s market is very painful for the world economy. Such problems could be solved by a translator with a good knowledge of both theory and practice of translating advertisements.

I decided to conduct my research in the field of advertisement translation, mainly from English into Romanian. I have chosen the advertisements from magazines since they represent a solid text of considerable length which has many challenging sentences for the consumer-oriented text translator. As it is practically impossible to examine all the advertising fields only the most common have been chosen. The advertisements were selected from fields such as audio, video devices, computers, cars, food, postal services, alcoholic drinks, communications and so on.

The nature of translation and its techniques continue to change. This dynamic development has required rethinking and retooling the application of translation methods. Nowadays it is not enough to know fundamental methods and a certain number of definitions or protocol, it is extremely important to learn how to enrich problem-solving principles in translating modern texts.

The purpose in writing this work was to study the language of advertisements and to single out the translation difficulties of printed magazine advertisements, then to present an introduction to methods and techniques of translation, later focusing on establishing peculiar and problem samples of advertisements which are of great interest to a translator. After the translation analysis the most common translation difficulties will be found and a number of recommendations will be forwarded. The desired result is a work that could be used both by the companies advertising their products and the students dealing with texts of the kind with the confidence that the issues fundamental to translation were covered in an integrated fashion. Another purpose was to ensure that both company representatives and students might be given practical advice which would allow them to avoid making most common mistakes. This work is not meant to be a descriptive one that only discusses the major issues of translation in isolated sections without integrating these concepts into everyday practice. Learning the details of translation techniques is relatively easy, the challenging part is learning how to translate various types of texts correctly. Having specific strategies for reading the original texts and careful guidance when translating them can help a lot both the companies and the students to study seriously and translate confidently various types of advertisements.

The paper comprises the following sections:

- Structure and composition of advertisements

- Characteristic features of advertisements

- Ways of translating advertisements

- Difficulties and peculiarities of advertisement translation