Article,
L'amour de l'impossible: Advertising and Translation
FORUM-International Journal of Interpretation and Translation, 9 (2): 233--254 (2011)
Abstract
The translation of advertisements, in a strict sense, is rarely possible. Linguistic and cultural considerations make the translation of standard texts difficult enough: whether at word level, sentence level or text level translators constantly encounter a number of problems which test to the limit not only their knowledge of source language and target language but even their ingenuity. The language of advertising adds to the complication by usually having a visual component which often resorts to wordplay between text and image. The present article examines a number of cases which pose the question of translation versus adaptation between English and Spanish. All is not lost, however, because the translation of advertisements can also be seen as the ultimate means of being faithful to an ST precisely by being unfaithful to it.
