Cultural aspects

The translation of advertisements is most apparent in India which has numerous languages that are used daily in the various regions. It is interesting to compare advertisements that appear in various languages. Sometimes the slogan or catchword appears awkward in a particular language because it might be a literal translation of the original one. This is very true of multinational companies like Pepsi or Hindustan Unilever. Unilever, for example, is a company that has branches in most countries of the world and have common campaigns to promote their products like soap powder. The slogan of “Trust Pink, forget stains” of the Vanish advertisement is common to UK, and the various regions of India. It is difficult to recapture the impact of the English slogan in all the Indian languages because of the syntactic peculiarities of each language. But what the translator has done is to translate it word by word in India, which results in a slightly awkward advertisement in regional languages like Malayalam.

One way to overcome this is to coin mixed language slogans like the extremely popular Pepsi slogan of “Yeh dil maange more”. This was trendy and catchy as it caught the spirit of the young metropolitan crowd of India who switch between English and Hindi effortlessly. But here the problem was that it catered only to the Hindi speaking crowd, and regional variations were difficult. The Pepsi campaign had to use its Hinglish slogan throughout the country. Coca Cola’s “Thanda matlab Coca Cola” was another example. Sometimes the advertisement comes up with regional differences. The Pears advertisement where the mother is also teaching her daughter while bathing her, is an example. In the Hindi version, she sings of the order of Mughal kings while in Malayalam she is singing of the solar system. This is because both versions borrow the melody of the same popular film song. It might have been difficult to translate the Hindi version and adjust it to the cadence of Malayalam. Both versions are effective.