Machine Translation of English Advertising Slogans: A Semantically-based Comparative Study

The translation is a channel of communication between different nations and should not be regarded as a simple matter. Machine translation (MT) has created a solution for people who need quick and low-cost translations; however, the appropriateness of the output cannot be ignored. The purpose of this study is to show the productivity of MT in the advertising industry. To this end, ۷۰ English slogans are sampled, and the Persian translations of these slogans, provided by MT, are selected and closely compared with the appropriate use of equivalents approved and accepted by researchers. This study aims to make an effort in evaluating the output of machine translations and possibly suggesting improvements, so the message of a slogan can quickly and explicitly be transferred to the receiver. The second objective is that one may need to know what changes to make before giving the slogan to the machine translation to have a better output. Finally, this piece of research aims to compare the output of machine translations with the original slogan. As a result, this research proves that MT of slogans cannot be changed since the concept will change. In some cases, the result of MT can be used as an equivalence of the original by applying some minor changes, but regarding advertising slogans, to keep the message, changes should be applied in structure, length, tense, semantics, and so on.

Keywords:

Translation , Machine Translation , Slogan , Advertising Slogans