Advertising

Advertising texts have been widely studied from the linguistic and sociological points of view, and have also been one of the favoured objects of semiotic analysis (from Barthes and Eco to the recent developments of visual and social semiotics). They have not, however, received the same treatment by translation studies. Especially before the year 2000, promotional materials (including sub-genres such as advertising, publicity, and tourist brochures) were mainly used in general translation handbooks or textbooks as examples, or ‘special cases’ of translation. Although several specialized articles had already been published, systematic research into advertising translation per se started only very recently, with monographs (Guidère 2000a, Bueno García 2000) and edited volumes (Adab and Valdés 2004). Recent research also marked a shift away from purely linguistic or verbal-only approaches, opening up new insights into the intersemiotic and multimodal nature of advertising texts, while also highlighting the need to take the cultural dimension of advertising translation into account. The entry, after investigating the reasons why advertising has been long neglected by translation studies (it is a largely non-verbal genre), critically analyzes verbal-only, intersemiotic and cultural approaches to advertising translation, linking them to their respective theoretical backgrounds.