Copy Adaptation, or How to Translate a Source Product for a Target Market

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to show the significance of product type and potential buyers’ expectations in ad translation for the production of commercially effective target versions. To this end, this study focuses on adverts for computer products as the referent of the advertising message, and computer users as the addressees. The cultural contexts in contact are the USA and the Spanish markets for these products. The source texts (ST) are adverts from popular USA computing magazines, while the target texts (TT) are from the same type of publications published in Spain. In order to measure the relevance of product type in the translation of these ads, a comparison of the STs and the TTs has been carried out in terms of verbal and non-verbal elements. The strategies used in the translation of these two groups of elements have been described and identified. The results obtained through the analysis of this corpus will shed light on (1) whether the shifts produced in the TTs respond to Spanish computer users’ expectations, that is, whether they are in line with the features of computing ads in Spanish, and (2) whether there are shifts clearly related to the product type.

‘If they have not the french’: translation choices inThe Happy Deliverie of Women(1612)

“…These involve processes related to elimination, addition, adaptation and reduction of material with respect to the ST, and have been gathered in five groups showing the relationship between the ST and the TT. The techniques described in Cruz García (2013) have also been found in the English translation of De l'Heureux Accouchement des Femmes with differing degrees of frequency, as we shall show in section 4 below. Table 1 presents Cruz García's selection of translation procedures divided into five groups, together with her own definitions of the terms (inverted commas signal verbatim copy).…”

“…Translation techniques have been the focus of several studies either from an empirical perspective (Bruzdziak 2013;Nord 2005), or from a more theoretical standpoint (Bassnett 2002;Mason 1994;Molina and Albir 2002;Newmark 1988). One case in point is Cruz García (2013), who analyses translation techniques in advertising discourse. Hers represents a comprehensive selection of techniques which derived from her serious reading of earlier literature on the topic (see for example Comitre Narvaez 1999;Valdés Rodríguez 2004) and her model can be successfully applied to earlier texts, as it is the case with The Happy Deliverie of Women in this paper.…”

“…In our paper, we describe the translation techniques in The happy deliverie of women (1612). For this analysis, we will follow the theoretical framework laid out by Cruz García (2013) because her method has grown from the examination of successful previous models in the analysis of translation strategies, thus reflecting an up-to-date state of the art. The text has been analysed manually in order to tag all samples of strategies.…”

The discourse markers indeed, in fact, really and actually and their Spanish equivalents in economy

“…Interactive markers are meant "to shape and constrain a text to meet the needs of particular readers", and interactional markers are deployed "to make his or her views explicit and to involve readers by allowing them to respond to the unfolding text" (Hyland, 2005: 49). The definitions and examples of these categories taken from the source are given in Table 1: The identification of translation procedures will be performed using the categories described in Cruz- García (2014) and applied earlier to the description of translation strategies in another corpus (Alonso-Almeida & Sánchez, 2016). Translation procedures are used to introduce adjustments in the target text to accommodate meaning.…”

“…Our notion of metadiscourse follows Hyland (2005) from where we have also taken the taxonomy of metadiscourse markers used in the analysis of data to classify findings. The identification and the classification of the translation procedures rely on Cruz- García (2014).…”