Rhetorical figures and the translation of advertising headlines

In advertising texts, the most important linguistic element is the headline. The function of the headline is to persuade readers to continue reading the remaining body text and, ideally, buy the advertised product. Using a corpus of 45 English-language advertisements and their translated Russian pairs, this article investigates what happens to rhetorical figures in the translation process. Three broad translation strategies are identified (transference, source-language-orientated and target-language-orientated) and their implications discussed in detail. The use of transference (untranslated retention of original) highlights the foreignness of the product being advertised, relying on the source culture’s attractiveness to the target audience. The most popular strategies are those which are source-language-orientated, maintaining the source meaning in the target headline. These strategies, often resulting from advertisers’ insistence on following a model advertisement, have the greatest impact on the use of figures, and examples of compensation, loss and addition can be found. When target-language-orientated strategies are employed, translators have more freedom to create headlines using rhetorical figures. The article ends by suggesting that the analysis of translated Russian advertising headlines offers another concrete example of the globalizing tendencies of large corporations and the power they exercise in shaping contemporary media discourses

Russian ‘purely aspectual’ prefixes: Not so ‘empty’ after all?

Nearly two thousand perfective verbs in Russian are formed via the addition of so-called “empty prefixes” (čistovidovye pristavki) to imperfective base verbs. The traditional assumption that prefixes are semantically “empty” when used to form aspectual pairs is problematic because the same prefixes are clearly “non-empty” when combined with other base verbs. Though some scholars have suspected that the prefixes are not empty but instead have meanings that overlap with the meanings of the base verbs, proof of this hypothesis has eluded researchers. With the advent of corpora and electronic resources it is possible to explore this question on the basis of large quantities of data. This article presents a new methodology, called “radial category profiling”, in which the semantic network of a prefix is established on the basis of its “non-empty” uses and then compared, node by node, with the semantic network of base verbs that use the same prefix as an “empty” perfectivizing morpheme. This methodology facilitates a comprehensive analysis of ten prefixes, comparing their meanings in “non-empty” and “empty” uses and showing precisely how in the latter case overlap produces the illusion of emptiness. We are able to fully specify the semantic network of each prefix, and discover that for some prefixes there is overlap throughout the network, while for others overlap is restricted to a contiguous subsection of the network. We investigate the dynamic interactions among prefixes, and identify what meanings are incompatible with the “purely aspectual” function of the so-called “empty” prefixes