L’amour de l’impossible : advertising and translation

Sanchez, MT

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.

Citation

Sanchez, M. (2011). L’amour de l’impossible : advertising and translation. Forum (Korean Society of Conference Interpretation, École supérieure d'interprètes et de traducteurs), 9(2), 233-254. https://doi.org/10.1075/forum.9.2.11san

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Oct 1, 2011
• Deposit Date: Jan 12, 2012
• Journal: FORUM - International Journal of Interpretation and Translation
• Print ISSN: 1598-7647
• Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 9
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 233-254
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/forum.9.2.11san
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/forum.9.2.11san
• Related Public URLs: http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/2451909x