La traduction de la publicité : de l'intraduisible à la créativité

Abstract

In this thesis, we tried to study the translation of advertisement - from French into Arabic - taking into consideration the specificity of this field through a careful analysis of a common phenomenon: "untranslatability". Actually when translating advertisement, fidelity to the source message does not apply - like in other fields of translation - to the meaning and more so to the form, but to what the translator tries to convey; in other terms the impact. Based on Pergniers model, we actually think that the translators role is somehow identical to that of the creator of the original message, with an additional constraint, that of bridging the gap between two disparate languages and cultures and recreating the same impact in the target language. In the theoretical part of our thesis we presented first a comprehensive translatological "State-of-the-Art" in a field that has not been very well explored up to date. We listed and discussed the standpoints of some of the greatest contemporary experts in this field among whom are Mathieu Guidère and Katarina Reiss. Then we proposed potential solutions to the problem of untranslatability by resorting to "equivalence", "adaptation", and "creativity" as an ultimate alternative. The second practical part of our thesis consists in a corpus of 18 advertisements taken from various French magazines, which we translated into Arabic, providing for each a translatological analysis. In our conclusion, we answered the original question "Is advertisement translatable?" as follows: translating advertisement by equivalence or adaptation is sometimes possible, yet in some cases, translators have to find a safe refuge in creativity, which is an act of rewriting rather than translating.