Advertising Slogans In English-arabic Translation: Syntactic Analysis

Résumé: Brochures provide an extraordinary amount of advertisements and a rich corpus for the study of advertising translation. Within the advertising text, we can recognize the brand name, the logo and the catch line or the slogan. The purpose of the slogan is to reduce the advertising message to a short sentence or phrase. This paper attempts to identify the syntactic features which characterize the English slogan and makes it simple, memorable and original. The paper investigates the length of the advertising slogans: what is the average length of a slogan? Do advertisers prefer the use of sentences or phrases? Do they have recourse to negatives and questions? Which tense is commonly used? The paper then analyses the translations of the selected English slogans into Arabic to see how the syntactic divergences between English and Arabic influence the advertising text. Hence, the corpus for this study consists of a list of English slogans and their translations into Arabic. The slogans under analysis appear in the brochures of different British companies and organizations targeting Arab consumers. A study of the slogan and its translation is quite useful because more and more international companies are marketing their products in the Arab countries and they are in constant need of efficient slogans to exhort the targeted consumers to buy their products.

Publié dans la revue: AL-MUTARĞIM المترجم