Region-specific variants

Sometime the translation has to occur at multiple levels—at the linguistic, visual and cultural levels. The hegemony that is enjoyed by English at the global level is replicated by the hegemony of Hindi in India. Most national brands make use of cultural symbols that are popular in the Hindi speaking areas of India. So a typical bride is always Hindu and North Indian. Weddings mean the groom on a horse and noisy revelers in the baraat. Advertisements rely heavily upon rituals or beliefs like shagun, karva chauth etc which are very region-specific. We do not see any translation in these advertisements except at the language level. 

The advertisement of national brands for specific regional festivals is also sometimes marked by awkwardness that arises out of unfamiliarity with the cultural milieu. Let us consider the advertisement of ‘national’ brands for products like television or kitchen equipments for a special occasion like Onam which is the festival of Kerala. They attempt to reach out to the Kerala consumer by using popular cultural symbols like the flower bed or snake boat race, but the unfamiliarity with the specific practices is apparent. This is because the translator has worked at the language level but not at the visual level.

An example of how an advertisement can be translated only at the visual level is that of the soap Lux. It is an international brand that showcases the current most popular heroine of the cinema of the region in which it advertises. So, if it makes use of a Hollywood actress in the Anglo-American world, it has a Bollywood heroine in North India, and her regional variants in other parts of India. This is an example of visual translation. Sometimes advertisements do away with the necessity of translation at all because they only have visuals and minimal language component. The ads for Adidas or Nike are examples.