Beauty- and Fashion-Blogs: Lost in Translation

Abstract

Fashion and beauty blogs appeared as a result of the globalization of the fashion and beauty industry, as well as the virtualization of popular fashion magazines. They introduce a new type of discourse that attracts both marketers and translation theorists, because the Russian Internet badly needs prompt and high-quality translation of huge volumes of such content. Typical problems of audiovisual translation (compression, synchronization) are superimposed on the abundance of constantly growing terms. Beauty/fashion blogs are a kind of visual-verbal unity, where the visual demonstration of a product is accompanied by a verbal component, i.e., description, instructions, etc. This article introduces an analysis of Vogue video blogs, which confirmed other scientific publications on this topic: language economy and technical specifics of audiovisual translation make loan translation, transcription, and transliteration the most popular translation methods in this type of discourse. The translator must have a certain erudition in fashion and beauty industry, since specialized glossaries on these topics do not have time to record new terms and professionalisms that constantly emerge within this rapidly developing area.