Cross-cultural Assumptions in the Translation of Advertising: How realistic are these?

The translation of advertising as written text still demonstrates many of the problems of cross-cultural transfer which have formed the object of Translation Studies research in recent years. Source text induced target text production is very often the norm, with more of a documentary than instrumental view of the intended ST/TT relationship (Nord 1991). Marketing experts do not always fully exploit the expertise of the translator, although not to do so may (sometimes seriously) affect the success of an advertising campaign. This paper, on the one hand, seeks to highlight some of the problems observed in advertising texts in the language pair English-French and, on the other hand, to discuss the relevance of culture-specific factors of a message in the functionally-successful translation of advertising texts..