TRANSLATING HEADLINES IN PRINT BUSINESS ADVERTISEMENTS FROM ENGLISH INTO ARABIC IN UAE

Business advertisements are multimodal consumer-oriented texts with persuasive functions. Advertisers create specific advertisements for marketing products/services in specific contexts. The headline in an advertisement is the main element as it attracts attention and summarizes the advertising message. Advertising relies on socio-cultural implications through visual and non-visual elements. When products/services are marketed in a new context with a different language, their advertisements are translated into that language. Because languages have different ways of encoding information, the success of a product/ service in a culturally different context depends on how its advertisement is translated. The structural and cultural differences between English and Arabic and the functional nature of headlines in English business advertisements seem to have direct bearing on how advertising headlines are rendered into Arabic. This study investigates the translation of advertising headlines from English into Arabic in the context of marketing products/services in UAE. The aim is to identify the techniques used in translating headlines and their implications for translation quality and to identify views of Arab customers over the acceptability of Arabic versions of advertising headlines. The study findings indicate that seven translation techniques are used and customers consider Arabic advertisements produced via function-oriented translation techniques more acceptable than translations produced via form-based techniques.