An-Najah Staff

This study explores the issue of translated advertising brochures in terms of translation strategies and linguistic inaccuracies by examining a corpus of 35 English-Arabic brochures promoting personal care products. Specifically, the study identifies the translation strategies adopted in translating advertising headlines, body copies, and images. It also highlights and categorizes a few remarks of linguistic inaccuracies whose possible causes are clarified to help translators produce more adequate translations. In analyzing the corpus of brochures, the researcher adopted a descriptive and analytic approach in which examples were collected, categorized and explained, and, in some cases, more appropriate alternative translations were suggested. To give more accurate analysis and to enhance the quality of the study, the researcher conducted eighteen (18) personal interviews with people whose jobs are relevant to the personal care market. The analysis demonstrates that translating advertising brochures does not always involve giving the direct equivalent meaning in the target language (TL), but translators sometimes have to manipulate the source texts (STs) to produce readable and acceptable target texts, and so the findings showed that the strategies ranged from complete transference of the source language to complete substitution or adaptation. Finally, the study concludes with a set of recommendations that will hopefully help future researchers as well as future translators of advertising brochures.

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