ABSTRACT
Advertising is a fundamental communication tool for both producers and consumers. Cultural and ideological elements play a fundamental role in advertising strategies, particularly in places like the Arab world where various taboos are still widespread. So, advertising approaches are planned and shaped to fit the consumer’s needs and cultural norms. This chapter examines the complexity of translating advertisements, a burgeoning translation genre and field, at different strata: prosodic, pragmatic, syntactic and textual. Lack of awareness of such variables inevitably results in mistranslation and/or misrepresentation of products, and ultimately failure in the overall marketing process. Drawing on English–Arabic advertising translation of audiovisual ads, the chapter shows how differences in culture and ideology weigh heavily on translators’ choices and decision-making, such as when to domesticate or foreignize. The controversial question is what to do with the target audience (audience analysis). Presenting advertisements originally created for an English-speaking audience without some intervention to an Arab audience may not be a wise decision, where the two main criteria are accuracy and naturalness. Data analysis reveals that accuracy and naturalness in translation are often opposing aims in advertising translation, meaning that translators often must sacrifice one for the other.
