TRANSLATING AN ADVERTISEMENT

While translating an advertisement, it is essential that the ad should be able to disseminate the information about the product or service and persuade the potential customers to buy the product or avail the service. Therefore, it is absolutely essential that the translated add must be as fluent as the original and accurate to the original advertisement.

Translation of an article can be done in multiple ways. It can be preceded by making a new advertisement on the same idea about the same product or service but in a different language. However, this is quite a costly proposition and mostly is no being done. In most cases, it will happen that the translation of the advertisement will in such a manner will lead to a new ad altogether.

The audio of the advertisement could be subtitled. But do you think anyone in today’s world have the time and patience to read the subtitles of the advertisements? Thus, the only option left would be to dub the advertisement in the target language of the intended audience.

In case of dubbing, though the translator is changing the audio of the advertisement to the target language through dubbing artists but what happens is that the translator has to work within sone constraints as the translator’s translated dialogues should match with the lip movements of the characters of the advertisement.

Thus, even though nida’s(pioneer in the fields of translation theory and linguistics)notion of dynamic equivalence is significant in translating the advertisement, but is not always possible to follow dynamic equivalence in translating advertisements.