Is the Persuasiveness of Taglines Lost in Translation?

Abstract

Advertising has become an important part of any business and it has got into our everyday life via different media channels. Sometimes it is a persuasive process directed towards a mass audience aiming at promoting a product or service. In order to guarantee a successful expansion and entrenchment of a company, brand or product into another market the localization process should be well planned. The advertising campaign of a new foreign product or service has to undergo the process of translating which could reformulate/localize the text of the advertisement in a subjective way. The persuasiveness is one of the functions of advertisements and it should be maintained in the source and target texts. The expression of persuasive elements in English taglines and their transposition in Lithuanian is a relevant object of the study. The problem of the article is whether the persuasive elements of the translated Lithuanian taglines retain the same persuasive influence as the original (the English language) taglines. Taglines (133 units) are grouped according to classifications of translation methods, syntactic aspects (sentence length, sentence functional type, tagline structure) and persuasive elements. The research of the taglines has revealed the tendency that the meaning of the original taglines has been maintained in the translated Lithuanian taglines, but the persuasive elements have undergone the qualitative changes.