Translational and Marketing Communication: a Comparison of Print and Web Advertising of Italian Agro-food Products

One of the many effects of the new economy has been the deconstruction of traditional market channel distribution. Today, the traditional 'producer-wholesaler-retailer-consumer' sequence of buying and selling is changing as the World Wide Web has created a direct link between produce and customer (B2C) and between producer and producer (B2B). Like many other economies, the Italian one, which is largely based on small and medium sized industries, has had to come to terms with the challenge of competing in this new market place, with the handicap of having to do so in a language other than its own. This paper investigates how the Italian agro-food sector promotes its products beyond the national market. In order to examine the interdependence between medium and message, a corpus of electronic promotional texts is compared and contrasted with a comparable corpus of printed advertising material from specialized magazines in English. After examining common startegies adopted in the two media, specific translation strategies adopetd in the web corpus are analyzed.