Advertising

This entry lays out a short history of translation research as applied to advertising, outlining four main ‘tiers’ or stages. In the first tier, the focus lies exclusively with the verbal elements of the text. In the second tier, the scope of research broadens so as to embrace non-verbal elements and multimodality. A third, more holistic tier further adds the marketing context of the advertising campaign to the researcher’s perspective. The fourth and final tier reflects critically on the translation of advertising in the light of critical discourse analysis, gender and cultural studies, and postcolonialism. After this analysis of existing studies, a few examples of possible future trends for interdisciplinary research will be outlined. Such trends might lead to tools and perspectives that could prove more useful when looking at the rich complexity of the translation of advertising, provided they are sustained by a systematic collaboration between translation studies and international marketing studies.