GENDER CHARACTERISTICS OF ADVERTISING IN TERMS OF TRANSLATION (BASED ON THE COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF WOMEN’S AND MEN’S COSMETICS COMMERCIALS)

Abstract

The article examines gender stereotypes and communicative strategies in cosmetics advertising discourse in terms of commercials creation and translation. The work is relevant due to the lack of studies concerning the gender aspect of advertising in the translation process. By gender in this study we understand the factors that predetermine the social behaviour of women and men, as well as their relationships with each other. Thus, gender stereotypes refer to the traditional beliefs about femininity and masculinity that exist in society. A commercial can be addressed to a definite audience either directly or indirectly, the recipient’s gender can be marked by the subject matter of the text itself, as well as by certain lexical, grammatical and stylistic means used to attract the recipient’s attention. In the present study we analysed 150 commercials addressed either to male or female audience or having no gender orientation. The goal of the study was to consider gender- oriented and gender-neutral commercials in terms of their linguistic features and the problems of translation into Russian. The study of the obtained material with the help of functional-stylistic method allowed to single out a number of masculine and feminine images, which are common for cosmetics advertising. Gender-oriented texts widely employ various stylistic devices which bring additional expression to the description of an advertised product. Preservation of this expressiveness should be one of the main tasks of a translator. Besides purely linguistic difficulties, a translator meets the challenges connected with the communicative and sociolinguistic adaptation of the text, since the advertised product should always evoke positive emotions. Gender-neutral commercials are usually more informative and more reserved from the stylistic point of view which makes their translation easier.

Keywords

• translation
• advertising
• gender
• gender stereotypes
• femininity
• masculinity