Translating English-Arabic Business-to-Consumer Advertisements: a Domesticating Approach

Abstract

This study investigates the linguistic and cultural problems encountered in translating English-Arabic Business-to-Consumer (B2C) Advertisements in a Saudi environment, using a domesticating approach to assess the quality of the translated advertisements. Baker`s taxonomy (2011) of equivalence analysis and Halimah’s (2015) translation quality assessment 'ACNCS' criteria will be used for the analysis and discussion of seven B2C advertisements randomly chosen mainly from brochures. Results of the discussion and analysis of the examples used in this paper have indicated that there is an urgent need for domesticating and culturalising the translation of advertisements as they tend to lose essential linguistic and cultural aspects of the original texts and cause textual violations in the B2C Arabic advertisements. Some suggestions and recommendations have been made to help translators adjust their translation methods to fit the Arabic linguistic and cultural contexts as well as those who are interested in carrying out further research in this field.