When ‘Holy cow!’ becomes a team loyalty marker: translating fútbol across cultures

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe success of advertising in a global forum depends in part on the ability to translate local phenomena for an international audience, and the challenges presented in communicating culturally-bound sentiment and loyalty across national boundaries is largely uninvestigated in the realm of sports. One of the most memorable advertising campaigns in the recent history of Spanish soccer is a series of TV commercials widely known as ‘campañas de sentimiento’ (‘campaigns of sentiment’). The aim of this paper is to examine how the expressive, referential, and appellative functions of these commercials are explicitly and implicitly conveyed in the source texts and the choices translators face in rendering those functions into target language commercials. Nord’s purposeful approach to translation and her documentary and instrumental choices in translation are the basis for the analysis. The results show that the expressive and referential functions are used as instruments to serve the appellative macro speech act that these campaigns represent and to convey the values of the soccer team. Translation choices are made according to the very nature of those values.