Skopos in Advertising Translation into Arabic

Abstract

Current definitions identify advertising to be paid mass communication designed to persuade or influence the customer. In today's world, we are witnessing significant growth in the volume of international trade as a result of globalization which requires increased transferring of advertising messages from one culture to another. Advertising translation thus becomes an important tool in maintaining and adapting the main persuasive function of advertisement in specific target market, with its specific cultural context. This thesis analyzes three print advertising text translations from English into Arabic, in an attempt to cover different advertisement forms (print newspaper ad, direct mail flyer, and advertising brochure) within different industries. Results of the study indicate that advertising translation primarily needs to adhere to the function or purpose of the translated text, which is to achieve the same effect on target market audience as on the original market. Study also shows that advertising translation is affected by the types of the text or parts of the text which are ultimately linked to their function (informative, expressive, operative). The research concludes that the skopos theory offers broad useful guidelines for advertising translation, the most important being the skopos rule, while its general approach enables and directs translators to be flexible and utilize different micro-strategies when dealing with an advertising text. The later, however, implies that the skopos theory should not and cannot be the only tool in translator's arsenal, since it does not deal with specific micro-strategies.