Ideology has a twofold sense in advertising. One is general and aims to standardize the consumers' needs and traits by globalized means to persuade them to buy the products. The other is specific whereby the advertisement campaigns can introduce, reinforce and /or challenge some ideological values as of politics, religion, race and gender. To sell globally, advertisements are translated into other languages. This requires adjusting the ideological values to the Target Language (TL) audience. When the ideological dimension of the TL is given priority, transcreation, instead of translation per se, becomes the best choice. Unlike the traditional translator who is expected to be faithful to the Source Language (SL), the transcreator should always maintain proximity to the TL ideology so as to avoid unwanted sensitivities of the TL audience and should adopt creative ideas in order to achieve resonance in the TL. The present paper aims to investigate the implications of advertising ideology for transcreation into Arabic. The global advertisement campaigners seem to be aware that Arabic and Islam represent a unified ideology represented in values of national identity, politics and gender. Most transcreation of these campaigns have achieved both proximity to the TL audience and creativity of ideas that do not clash with the ideological status quo in the Arab World. But despite the laudable reputation of transcreation nowadays in the Translation Studies literature as the best strategy of advertisement translation, it looks like it cannot escape the twofold sense of ideology in those texts. While it does embrace diversity of ideological values of SL and TL, an advertisement campaign transcreation is unable to outbalance the general and more solid ideology of standardizing the consumers' needs and motives.
The present paper investigates the self-translation action as practiced by a bilingual writer: Jabra Ibrahim Jabra who has rendered a chapter of his novel Hunters in a narrow Street, written originally in English, back into Arabic. It is based on the assumption that the shifts or changes made in the Arabic text can hardly be attributed to the poetic licence or the creative potential of the self-translator. They should be seen in the light of bicultural competence of the self-translator as cultural mediator. This competence unfolds in his knowledge of the disparities between the readerships, socio-political structures and censorship rules of both the source and target languages and cultures. Consequently, the self-translator is also expected to designate and maintain the skopos of the target language text. Unlike the translator per se, the self-translator has the privilege of access to the intention of the source language text prior to its production . All these prerequisites contribute to the self-translator's decisions of introducing shifts and changes in the target language text through cultural mediation. Being written in English, the source language text is seen to have undergone cultural mediation too: a fact that leads to a conviction that Jabra was a 'double mediator '.
Self-translation can be a powerful tool in the transmission of cultural identity. The Baghdad-born American Sinan Antoon, as self-translator of his successful novel "The Corpse Washer", was awarded the Banipal Saif Ghobash prize for his invisibility and fluency in the Target Language, English. Accordingly, he is expected to have domesticated the Source Text cultural idiosyncrasies in the Target Text at the expense of accuracy, and met the English reader expectations in consequence. Apparently, he has accomplished a readable translation. Still, it is assumed that he has also chosen to be visible in many instances of his self-translation. Such visibility is substantiated by retaining the Arabic cultural items in English through foreignization. There is ambivalence here. Antoon's intended visibility as a self-translator is attributed to his emotional and cultural involvement in the cause of his country of origin, Iraq. His self-translation is an attempt to avoid cultural alienation, make a difference, let the Target Text readers be aware of his cultural identity, and achieve universality.
It is an oversimplification to state that any poetic image can be literally rendered into another language since there may be changes involved in the translation process. For the translator, it is a matter of import to distinguish between motivated and non-motivated changes. The former being inevitable and the latter are due to insufficient interpretation of the Source Text. The present article investigates those changes by highlighting factors that cause them. The main determinants of such changes are discerned as language, culture and personal aspects.The present study, hence, aims at designing appropriate strategies for translating poetic images. These strategies, however, must not be adopted haphazardly by the translator. They must be careful in resorting to each strategy as much as it effectuates certain criteria dictated by the nature of text, the Source Text and the Target Text reader.
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