Multimodality and contextualisation in advertisement translation: a case study of billboards in Hong Kong
The Journal of Specialised Translation, (2015)Аннотация
Though more and more non-verbal modes are deployed in advertising nowadays, related literature shows that non-verbal modes involved in advertisements are largely neglected in most research. The present paper demonstrates the role of non-verbal elements in advertisements and the need for the translator to contextualise the linguistic messages in advertisement translation. Through a detailed case analysis of billboards collected from Hong Kong, it explores the ways in which translated linguistic messages are contextualised by extra-linguistic components and indicates that the translation methods used in the mediation between different cultures are largely determined by the multimodal nature of billboard advertising. The theoretical insight into the notion of context in Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986) has been applied to describe and explain how the linguistic and extra-linguistic modalities of the billboards can interact respectively within the cognitive environments of the original and the target audiences. Based on results from the case study, this article concludes that translators are not only influenced by multimodal aspects of the texts they translate, but that their translation methods tend to be pre-decided by the extra-linguistic elements of the advertisement to be translated as those elements are not to be altered in translation.
Описание
Estudio de caso en inglés sobre los elementos no verbales y las estrategias de mediación en la traducción publicitaria de los anuncios en Hong Kong.