Lexical and cultural choices in Slovene translations of German and English car slogans

Abstract

The current paper presents the analysis of translation strategies and linguistic characteristics in Slovene translations of commercial car slogans from English and German. There is no uniform definition of the advertising slogan in the scientific literature; therefore, we attempt to provide the definition of a slogan in the context of marketing communication. One of the main functions of both social and commercial advertising is to provide information to the target audience and make it act in the way desired by the advertisers. In contemporary Translation Studies, translation is defined as a transnational and intercultural communication activity. Therefore, one of the primary tasks of translators is to mediate not only between languages but also between cultures. The objective of the paper has been to identify and describe the language features of car slogans at phonological, lexical, syntactic, and semantic levels, with due attention to the functionality of these messages in comparison with the messages relayed by slogans in other trades. The study has revealed that, due to the specific market niche, most car slogans tend to use specific language devices and discourse. The theoretical framework is based on German functionalist approaches in Translation Studies – Holz-Mänttäri’s theory of action (Handlungstheorie) and Reiß/Vermeer’s theory of translation’s purpose (Skopostheorie).