Semiotic transmutations in advertising design arguments for an emphasis on

advertising translation



1


Semiotic transmutations in advertising design arguments for an
emphasis on advertising translation


Abstract
This proposal approaches the study of semiotic transmutations in the context of
advertising translation. Using IKEA as an example, it explores the world of non verbal
translation and the close relation between text and image. Is it possible to translate
from one semiotic system to another in a similar way as one would translate from one
language to another? Can an image be translated? How can the identity of a brand be
interculturally and intersemiotically translated through advertising its products and
itself? The research focuses on how advertising campaigns are adapted to each
countrys cultures and analyses the processes involved in their development from a
semiotic point of view.

Keywords: Advertising translation, semiotics, transmutations, image, visual, IKEA


Theoretical background and research questions
Our everyday life is full of images, icons, signs and symbols. We constantly see them,
consciously or unconsciously and they mean something to us. But, do they mean the
same thing to all of us? Does our cultural background play a decisive role in the
perception of the images that surround us? Can an image be translated into a different
culture? I live in London, one of the most multicultural cities in the world and I
constantly ask myself these questions and that is exactly what my research proposal
aims to explore.
This proposal is an attempt to portray how semiotics can be utilised to comprehend

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aspects of non verbal translation as well as analysing the text/image relationship and
although it is not the aim of this research to debate the linguistic conception of images
as portrayed in structuralist semiotics, it is important to take into account different
points of view in order to explain what is this research trying to achieve. Is it possible
to translate from one semiotic system to another in a similar way as one would
translate from one language to another? How can the identity of a brand be
interculturally and intersemiotically translated through advertising its products and
itself? Can an image be translated? Sophie Moirand said, Les textes aussi sont des
images (Texts are also pictures), conversely can we assume that an image can be
text? Advertisements can contain text and sometimes you need the text in order to
understand the image. We can obviously translate the written message but can we
translate the visual message? In the same way that the verbal message can be
translated the image can be transmuted (Jakobson, 1959 and Gorlee, 1994). I will use
some of the main analytic concepts central to the field of semiotics and show how they
can be applied to a translating or transmuting context. This is the reason why my
approach has to be based in semiotics because it is a more pliable field.

Semiotics started becoming a cutting edge approach to culture and media studies in
the late sixties, to some extent due to the work of Roland Barthes, who in his book
Mythologies (1957) analysed advertisement and media and showed how seemingly
familiar objects signify all kinds of ideas about the world. After Barthes other
semioticians have approached the field of advertising semiotics like Danesi in
Understanding Media Semiotics (2002) and Nth in Semiotics of the Media: State of
the Art, Projects and Perspectives (1990). However, their approach is clearly focused
on a Media and Communication point of view. Floch in Visual Identities (2000) or Kress
and van Leeuwen in Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (1996) offer an
approach based on visual analysis. Probably one of the works that I identify more with
is The Discourse of Advertising (1992) by Cook where he analyses the importance of
advertising taking into account all the meaning-making elements that form part of it. My
research approach is somehow inspired in this paragraph excerpted from his book:
In contemporary capitalist society, advertising is everywhere. We cannot walk
down the street, shop, watch television, go through our mail, read a newspaper
or take a train without encountering it. Whether we are alone, with our friends or
family, or in a crowd, advertising is always with us, if only on the label of

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something we are using. Given this ubiquity, it is strange that many people are
reluctant to pay attention to ads. An ad is never the programme they are
watching, never the letter they are waiting for, never the part of the newspaper
they are reading. Despite all the care and skill in their creation, ads are flicked
past, put in the bin, zipped or zapped. People pay to see films and read books,
they put paintings in galleries and sculptures in museums; but advertising is
often regarded as a peripheral creationexcept by those directly involved in it
[...] Advertising is everywhere but nowhere. (Cook, 1992:1)
I think ads need to be given the importance they deserve and therefore my research
will concentrate on a field, advertising translation, which although it has become more
popular in the last few years it is still relatively underdeveloped and will help to
understand how it is possible to get closer to influence people by tailoring ads to their
cultural backgrounds and needs.
Advertising Translation is one of the most interesting topics of research due to the huge
importance of the fact of not only translating but in some cases adapting the advertising
campaigns to the culture of the country in which a product is going to be promoted. In
order to do this I have decided to explore the world of IKEA because of its presence
all around the world in different countries with different cultures and creeds. It was also
decisive the fact that its advertising campaigns are well known for their originality and
appearance in different communication media and in different countries.
As the title of my future thesis states: Semiotic transmutations in advertising design
arguments for an emphasis on advertising translation, it will not primarily deal with an
analysis of how the ad campaigns are translated into other languages but it will focus
on how these campaigns are adapted to each countrys cultures and how this process
is developed. Even though it will include some verbal translation when required, my
analysis of verbal translation will not be performed from the perspective of Linguistics
but from a semiotic viewpoint that will consider the cultural and non-verbal contexts.
I will also analyse the concept of IKEA as a brand and its corporate image that shows
the image of IKEA to the world. The importance of its use of colour and, its
symbology and the semiotic transmutation of these colours and symbols are also an
important part of my research as they represent the identity of IKEA as a brand, as
well as the use of icons or symbols that are present in almost every ad campaign by
IKEA and sometimes they must be translated or adapted, and this research will

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analyse the semiotic processes through which these intercultural adaptations or
translations are achieved.
At this point it is important to explain what exactly semiotic transmutation is and why it
plays such a decisive role in the development of my research. The term inter-semiotic
translation or transmutation first appeared in Jakobsons On Linguistics aspects of
translation, (1959). According to Gorlee (1994:17) Jakobson must be considered as
the originator of the semiotic approach to translation.
When exploring what works have been done in advertising translation, I realised that
most of the material that has either been published or that has been subject of
research, focused its emphasis on analysing phenomena like adaptation, localisation,
loss and gain of textual meaning, the role of the translator, the unit of translation or
translatability among others. I envisage that my research work will flow in a different
direction within the field of advertising translation. Kress and van Leeuwen (1996,
2001) have suggested that concepts from visual and multimodal communication need
to be incorporated in all areas of translation, including advertising translation. Precisely
that is what I intend to do: I will try to expand my research in that particular direction
and approach the study of advertising translation from a socio-semiotic point of view
that draws attention to the multi-semiotic character of advertisements and analyse the
relationship between images and language.
And finally since this research deals with the transtextual concept of paratextuality and
not just the more encompassing concept of intertextuality, I will also be taking into
account the literature from Grard Genette who takes into consideration both material
and social issues applied to the interpretation of texts. In Paratexts: Thresholds of
Interpretation, Genette defines paratext as:
More than a boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is, rather, a threshold
[...] a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of
transaction: a privileged place of pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on
the public, an influence that [...] is at the service of a better reception for the text
and a more pertinent reading of it. (Genette, 1997: 2)
Genettes concepts of intertext and paratext are of vital importance in order to stress
the relevance of what surrounds the text. Genette divides the paratext into a peritext
and an epitext, the latter defined as any paratextual element not materially appended to

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the text within the same volume but circulating freely in a virtually limitless physical and
social space. It is important to understand that all those texts that are not present in the
textual or iconic surface of the advertising campaigns but that help explaining them are
what this project is about. All those texts are part of their production conditions and
facilitate the comprehension of advertising texts and the reasons behind their
translations, adaptations or transmutations.

Methodology
In order to address the research questions outlined above I am planning to pursue the
following methodology. I will include an extensive comparative analysis of the
advertisement campaigns of IKEA from the establishment of the brand until
nowadays. The multimedia corpus will consist of a collection of advertisements in
different formats ranging from printed ads, online banners, signs and advertising in
urban spaces, architectural material that becomes a media screen for ads in urban
spaces to TV ads, to name some. Sara Leviosa in Corpus-based translation studies:
theory, findings, applications stated that:
A more recent development in monolingual corpus linguistics is the multimedia
corpus. It attempts to solve the problem of representing the primary, non-textual
data of those corpora which are either samples of oral discourse or a
combination of written text and pictures. (Leviosa, 2002: 7)
I will perform an exploratory survey in order to identify only those campaigns that have
been launched in Spanish and English speaking countries and try to establish how they
have approached the non verbal translation part of the campaign and identify the
elements that link the advertisement with the culture of the country the campaign has
been designed for. I will try to include different types of media ranging from their
catalogues, advertisements in magazines, WebPages, banners and also television
campaigns. A selection of the most suitable samples will be made based on how
representative they are of the subject of study. I will only include advertisements that
fulfil certain criteria that will make them eligible for the purpose of this thesis. These ads
will need to have been published in different hispanophone and anglophone countries
and show some dissimilarity between them although they would represent the same
product. In order to do this I will have to research the IKEA advertisement campaigns

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advertising translation



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that have been released worldwide and compare them analysing if they are targeting
an equivalent segment of the audience or if their target audience has changed when
advertised in a different country. The chosen ads will not have to follow a certain
pattern in relation to advertising a certain product or how they portray the brand as this
will restrict the amount of samples that would be available for the purpose of this
research. The aim is to have a varied sample that will show how they portray and
position themselves in relation to the target culture and not series of ads that represent
the same product advertised in different countries but with no cultural adaptation made
in order to promote them.
The theoretical and methodological framework for this research will be partially based
upon Kress and van Leeuwen's model for the analysis of visual images as designed in
their work Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (1996), some of Saussure
and Barthes' ideas from Mythologies (1957), Barthes Image-Music-Text (1977) and
The Semiotic Challenge (1994) and Gorlees Semiotics and the Problem of Translation
(1994) and finally Jakobsons 'On linguistic aspects of translation' (1959).
Semiotic products such as IKEAs advertisements in the different media could be
regarded as expressions of a more extensive discursive process. From a socio-
semiotics perspective authors like Fairclough (who ascertain that discourses take part
of social interactions among individuals comprising processes of text production,
distribution and consumption), Kress, Van Dijk or others have highlighted the
importance of these processes. For all of them, these processes of transmutation are
inscribed within the very process of production of advertising texts and images, hence
the significance on considering the transmutation processes within the social
production of meaning and discourses, and this is precisely the socio-semiotics
perspective that I was referring to at the beginning of this proposal.

Proposed thesis structure and chapter outline
The structure of the dissertation will be organised as follows although this is not set in
stone as it is likely to change during the course of the research.
The first chapter will be the introduction and will also deal with the identification and
discussion of the research problem that forms the main focus of this study. It will deal

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with the background and rationale of the research problem, statement of problem and
aim of study. It will introduce the corpus under scrutiny, what it comprises and how the
ads targeted were selected. In addition, it will try to establish the theoretical and
methodological framework for the analysis as well as including a detailed explanation
of the structure of the dissertation.
The second chapter will deal mainly with the literature overview and review and will
discuss the theoretical foundations upon which the subject of study relies on. It will
examine the existing literature relevant to this particular dissertation and will also
analyse the identity of IKEA as a brand.
The third chapter will set the analytical framework and research procedures. It will
describe the methodology utilised in order to collect the data in order to answer the
research questions.
The fourth chapter will comprise the findings and its interpretation. It will present all the
data obtained and show the outcome of the investigation tailored to each individual
piece of advertisement analysed.
The fifth chapter will be the conclusion. It will summarise the object of study and
provide a summing up of the precedent chapters. It will also demonstrate how the study
contributes to the research field and suggest recommendations for potential research
projects.









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Bibliographical references
Barthes, Roland ([1957] 1987): Mythologies. New York: Hill & Wang
Barthes, Roland (1977): Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana
Barthes, Roland (1994): The Semiotic Challenge, California U.P.
Cook, Guy (1992): The Discourse of Advertising. London: Routledge
Danesi, Marcel (2002): Understanding Media Semiotics. London: Arnold
Fairclough, Norman (1992): Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell
Floch, Jean-Marie (2000): Visual Identities (trans. Pierre Van Osselaer & Alec McHoul).
London: Continuum
Genette, Grard (1997) Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge University
Press
Gorlee, D.L. (1994): Semiotics and the Problem of Translation. Amsterdam-Atlanta: GA
Jakobson, Roman (1959): 'On linguistic aspects of translation', in R. A. Brower (ed.) On
Translation, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 232-9
Kress, Gunther & Theo van Leeuwen (1996): Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual
Design. London: Routledge
Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen (2001): Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and
Media of Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold
Laviosa, Sara (2002): Corpus-based translation studies: theory, findings, applications.
Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi
Nth, Winfried (Ed.) (1990): Semiotics of the Media: State of the Art, Projects and
Perspectives Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter