The effect of transcreation on coherence and the marketing purpose in Arabic

A comparison with a reference text

Abstract

Localization into a target language and culture has become a need for international corporations willing to expand. This comes with several translation strategies such as transcreation. However, this strategy implies transformation and creativity, which raises the question around the coherence of the transcreated messages. The paper follows the functionalist theory and studies 15 international corporate websites localized into Arabic. The slogan in particular is the main focus in the analysis as an appellative element that needs creativity to be conveyed correctly. Having selected the transcreated slogans based on pre-set criteria, this study assesses the similarities and differences between the Arabic and English slogans in terms of the overall message, and the coherence with the description of the product. It narrows down the corpus in order to focus on that specific quality issue since coherence can affect meaning negatively if it is done incorrectly, for example without taking the context into account. The results show to what extent the transcreation is coherent, pinpoint the potential accuracy gaps resulted from transcreation and how this strategy meets the advertising standards.