Cultural transfer in advertisement translation

Advertising is a fast growing industry in modern societies. Multinational companies promote their products to various countries by means of glamorous advertisements in different languages. When a product is marketed to another country, usually the original advertisement is translated with appropriate adaptation to cater to the needs of the new market. The process of advertisement translation often is not only a linguistic transfer, but also a cultural transfer. This paper attempts to discuss the relevance of the culturally-oriented approach to translation studies, and the skopos theory as advocated by Hans J. Vermeer in particular, to the cross-cultural communication of advertisement translation. The advertiser plays the key role of Translation Initiator (TI) in the translating process, by outlining the skopos for the translator to fulfill. The paper concludes that equivalent effect is not always the primary concern of translating of advertisement, and at times cultural transposition or adaptation is inevitable in this type of translating. This is not only legitimate, but also necessary, in the attainment of the skopos. © 1999 Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs (FIT) Revue Babel.