Women, Water and Cleaning Agents

Abstract

Advertising tends to conform to buyers’ sets of values in order to establish a common ground for communication and persuasion, thus fostering the replication of cultural habits. A number of such habits are of special interest to translators, since they are so well-rooted in our consciousness and taken as universal that their culture-specific nature might be overlooked. In particular, a superficial translation of advertising texts centred upon such ‘hidden’ stereotypes might result in marketing disaster. Translators should therefore make sure that they activate their cultural mediation resources as well as their linguistic skills when working on advertising texts. A useful practice in this regard is to undertake an in-depth and critical review of a recent corpus of advertisements in the target language/culture. A comparative analysis of several corpora from different cultural areas might provide an even better understanding of stereotypes and reveal their relative, culture-specific nature. This paper offers a pilot analysis of British, Italian and Russian advertisements for cleaning products and investigates the cultural stereotype of cleanliness emerging from them, highlighting culture-specific traits and commenting on their possible origin.