A bibliometric analysis of research on the translation of advertising. An inconstant object of study?

Franco Aixelá, Javier

doi:https://doi.org/10.7202/1111962ar

1. Introduction

The translation of advertising is a field of study which, on the one hand, seems reasonable to equate to business translation because its main function is often economic through the promotion of products and services, and which, on the other hand, tends to be presented in Translation Studies (TS) as an independent area due to the allegedly very peculiar and free nature of its mode of translation. In this sense, the translation of advertising would only, or at least primarily, attend to the functionality of the target text, as if this was not the main philosophy of most translations since the beginning of time. This approach often even claims a distinct nature for this mode of transfer, setting it apart from translation and announcing the birth of what is called “transcreation” (for example Dávila and Orero 2014; Pedersen 2016; Benetello 2018).

In principle, this increased leeway with respect to the original could easily prove uncomfortable for traditional theories of translation, focused on the idea of equivalence as identity, and we will see how this might be one of the main reasons for the late entrance of this mode of translation in academia. However, at the same time and for the same reasons, this hybrid nature should be particularly attractive for current TS scholars, who would face research questions in the field of advertising which would allow them to problematise and go beyond the traditional image of translation. Likewise, in today’s modern virtual and globalised economy, it would be only natural to expect that the translation of advertising would very often be analysed in conjunction with website localisation, another term that tends to seek its own theoretical and even existential space along the same lines as transcreation.

In this essay, we will try to describe and better understand the translation of advertising by answering these and other assumptions from a bibliometric point of view, that is, through the systematic study of publications dealing with this translation mode. To our knowledge, no bibliometric studies of this area of translation research have been conducted until now.

More specifically, these are the main research questions that we will put forward here, allowing us to situate research within our object of study through its comparison with research in business translation (R-BuT) and with TS as a whole:

What place does research in the translation of advertising (R-TAd) occupy among the other translation modes in academia?
What has been the quantitative evolution of R-TAd from its birth to the present day and what does this tell us about its nature?
What is the language distribution of R-TAd and what does this tell us about its internationality?
What is the thematic co-occurrence of R-TAd and what does this tell us about approaches in this area?
How is productivity in R-TAd as compared with R-BuT and with TS as a whole, and what does this tell us about the degree of specialisation in the area?
What are the patterns of co-authorship in R-TAd?
Which lines of research and what authors have the greatest impact on R-TAd?

2. Methodological issues

The source of the bibliographic data for this study is the BITRA (Bibliography of Interpreting and Translation) database, which, as of November 2021, comprised 86,546 documents, 471 of which were labelled as pertaining to the “Advertising” field.

In the mainstream international bibliographic indexes (Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science, etc.) there is no filter nor any other method allowing us to isolate studies on the translation of advertising without, at the same time, obtaining both huge amounts of documentary noise and large data gaps. At one extreme end of the scale, a search for “translation of advertising” in Google Scholar yields a medley of 1,180,000 results, a figure that is far beyond reality and impossible to act upon. It is also impossible to search with this thematic criterion in Scopus or Web of Science. In January 2022, the most productive search in Scopus, using the keywords “translat*” + “advertis*,” returned 101 results, less than a quarter of those included in BITRA. The same keyword search in Web of Science leads to very similar results, with 97 hits.

In short, BITRA is an open annotated bibliographic database which, in addition to the usual data in standard library catalogues, provides thematic information, as well as abstracts and impact in terms of citations detected, with more than 100,000 citations already mined. All this will allow us to address the research questions set out above on the basis of an empirical wealth of tens of thousands of classified and annotated specific bibliographic references.

It is this amount of data that allows us to carry out a bibliometric approach. There is not enough space here to explain in detail what bibliometrics consists of (see Rovira-Esteva, Olalla-Soler, et al. 2022). For the moment, suffice it to say that bibliometrics is a science that studies the development, dissemination and effect of publications from a quantitative perspective. The main aim is to obtain an analytical portrait of large volumes of published information, something a sole researcher would be unable to perform from their individual readings. At the same time, it is also important not to let this aseptic image become misleading. Thus, we also need to be aware that numbers do not generate themselves out of the blue nor do they provide any useful information by their mere presence. Their estimation and meaning always depend on the way the variables under study are selected, defined, classified and interpreted.

Since this is a descriptive study, no inference statistics will be used. As for the specific methods of compiling and processing information for each parameter, these will be indicated in the study of each of the indicators in order to save space and to concentrate everything related to each calculation.

3. An analysis of research on the translation of advertising

We will begin our analysis of R-TAd with a global overview of its current situation as compared with other translation modes, followed by a diachronic analysis of its evolution.

3.1. The global standing of R-TAd

Figure 1 features the accumulated research for the different translation modes covered by BITRA as of November 2021.

Figure 1

**R-TAd among the other modes (%)**

Figure 1 places TAd as part of the group of translation specialities with a notable but relatively low degree of research dedication, at the same level under 1% of BITRA, alongside research in the translation of comics, tourism or songs, and well below its sister genre, business translation, as well as journalistic, medical, legal, religious or audiovisual translation. Literary translation is on another incomparable level, with 25.4% of BITRA. This mode has not been included in this graph because its presence would affect the scale to the point of making it almost impossible to appreciate the details in the first, smaller group.

With its 471 specific studies up to 2021, R-TAd plays a significant role within TS, but at the same time it does not stand out as an intensely researched area. As we will see below, one possible partial explanation for this relatively low disciplinary presence is its particularly late start.

Another complementary and tentative explanation for the distribution of research interest in the different disciplines is given by their respective presence in the professional market. With the exception of religion and literature, whose large presence in academia is clearly due to an agelong humanist tradition and to their great social relevance, the degree of research dedication received by the other disciplines seems to correspond approximately to what might be the ratio of translators working in each of them, although we lack accurate data to be able to affirm this with anything but an impressionistic approach.

Table 1

**The evolution of R-TAd as compared with other modes**

Table 1 shows that there are very striking differences in terms of the point in time when systematic research began, a criterion that allows us to divide translation modalities into two major groups. On the one hand, nine of the eleven modes represented here (82%) were virtually ignored during twenty centuries of academic history. Generally speaking, they coincide with what Schleiermacher (1813) described as ancillary translation, a supposedly mechanical activity which would not be even worthy of being called translation and, of course, devoid of any research interest whatsoever. Even the 40 studies that appear on audiovisual translation up to 1951 were all published in the 20th century (as could not be otherwise, given the date of the invention of cinema). In this sense, the modalities (literature, religion) that did deserve to be labelled as translation according to the German Romantic philosopher have had an enormous advantage in terms of critical research mass in the past. The other modes have experienced a very slow awakening from 1960 onwards, with an exponential expansion in the 1980s and 1990s, coinciding with the emergence of modern, autonomous TS. Indeed, the generally functionalist and increasingly professionally-oriented approach favoured by later translation scholars required attention to the supposedly less transcendental and creative modes of translation, in many cases revolving around “boring” technolects that also had to wait until the second half of the 20th century before they received any major attention by terminology, a discipline which also had to wait until the 20th century to develop as an autonomous and independent endeavour.

In the specific case of the translation of advertising, it is important to remember that we are dealing with a hybrid modality characterised by its great creativity or potential scope for translation shifts, a feature that placed it out of bounds for traditional reflection on translation but that should be extremely attractive from the point of view of modern TS due to its ability to problematise the very concept of translation. So much so that, in the line of Schleiermacher’s true and false translation modes, the translation of advertising has even received its own label, transcreation, which attempts to place it on a different plane from “normal translation” or even any kind of translation. As Benetello comments:

[i]n my professional experience as a copywriter involved in both the creation ex nihilo of advertising and marketing copy (origination) and the adaptation of such copy from a foreign language – namely English and German – to my mother tongue (transcreation), the latter often results in the creation of a new original, rather than in the mere adaptation of figures of speech or cultural references.
2016: 257

This distinction between translation and transcreation is made by many researchers (for example Rike 2013; Pedersen 2016; 2017; Morón and Lobato 2019). In this connection, the subtitle of Ray and Kelly (2010) is particularly illustrative: “Reaching New Markets through Transcreation. When Translation Just Isn’t Enough.”

For our purpose in this article, it is particularly interesting to note that the translation of advertising may lead the TS researcher to a fascinating reflection about the limits of the concept of translation. Furthermore, this challenge is very much in the functionalist vein of a majority of modern TS and is an important empirical backing for the famous dethroning of the source text as defended by descriptive Translation Studies and the Skopos school. In other words, while the focus on the effectiveness of the target text rather than on the fidelity to the source text that characterises the translation of advertising might be an awkward issue best ignored by traditional translation theories prior to the 1980s, this very creative nature should act as a magnet for modern TS, since it provides an area where new functionalist ideas about translation could be clearly and systematically demonstrated.

Another bibliometrically interesting issue in the evolution of R-TAd is its apparent falterings and ups and downs between 1957 and 1980. In 1957, half a dozen studies on the translation of advertising suddenly popped up together, and somewhat out of the blue, without any apparent previous tradition, in a special issue 2(2) of Meta, a very young journal edited by the pioneer Jean-Paul Vinay. It would take no less than 11 years, according to the BITRA data, before the next, also isolated, publication of anything resembling R-Tad. Only in 1968 did another R-TAd article appear, this time in Babel, the other great pioneering TS journal. Thus, these five publications, appearing in 1957 in a single volume, can be considered “failed pioneers,” an attempt to call attention to a new area of research for which contemporary paradigms were not ready yet. It would be just the opposite of what happened with Holmes’ famous groundbreaking 1972 article, in which he began to imagine a discipline with a revolutionary approach that would soon catch on. This kind of situation, created by a mind ahead of its time and generating a flame that only spreads if there is a favourable context, is frequent in the history of science. On the one hand, these sparks of genius reflect the importance that an individual contribution to the creation of knowledge and social trends can have; on the other hand, they indicate that for an initiative to take off, it is not enough for it to be brilliant; there must also be a social context willing to recognise the need and thus develop the initial idea. In the 1950s, it was clear that the academic world was not yet ready to address the translation of advertising, even less to apply a “transcreative” approach, other than to declare it out of bounds and, thus, a non-problem for the theory of translation.

Figure 2, also based on Table 1, shows that in the 1980s and 1990s the academic context had greatly changed and the soil was now ready for the new seed. Thus, in these two decades there was a dramatic growth in research in three modalities that were related in principle, but which nevertheless lead to different current trends: advertising (middle line), business (top line) and tourism (bottom line). The problem we face here is twofold: on the one hand, at the end of the 20th century, the exponential growth in translation research was experienced by all the modalities much in the same way, as can be seen in the similarity of the slope traced for the three lines; secondly, the latest trends from 2001 onwards are no longer so similar, with the translation of advertising in fact seeming to lose research interest in the face of the growth of research in business translation and the stabilisation of the interest in tourism translation.

Figure 2

**The evolution of R-TAd as compared with R-BuT and R-TourismT**

With these data, it cannot be argued that the main reason why advertising translation received so much attention in the 1980s and 1990s was because of its peculiar “transcreative” nature, since all “ancillary” forms of translation, hitherto ignored, experienced similar Cambrian explosions, some of them even greater, such as audiovisual translation. Furthermore, in the 21st century, research into the translation of advertising, while by no means disappearing, has clearly attracted less interest. It is true that, especially over the last few years, the mining of publications in the database is still far from complete due to the lack of time to find all publications, so it is certain that the absolute figures will be greater for the 2011-20 decade. However, this compilation bias is equally applicable to research in all three modalities, but the only one that has decreased with the currently available data is R-TAd. To explain this, it will probably be necessary to conduct qualitative analyses that are not consistent with the methodology of this study and for which there would not be enough space here. However, what we do detect at this stage is that there has been a relative loss of interest which is not in line with the behaviour in other areas of TS research, nor with the logic of a field which, by its supposedly distinctive nature, should arouse a lively conceptual debate, something which will have to be addressed in subsequent studies.

3.2. The language distribution of R-TAd

Figure 3 shows the language distribution of R-TAd as compared with R-BuT and with TS in general. In all cases, the figures indicate the ratios of publications detected in each language.

The language distribution of R-TAd presents some interesting similarities and differences with respect to the situation of business translation and TS in general. The overall order remains almost the same in all three cases, with English playing the role of lingua franca which, in R-TAd and TS, accounts for around half of all publications. This clearly shows that many – probably a majority – of the non-native English-speaking academics around the world publish in English on a regular basis, seeking greater visibility and presence in the most recognised international journals and publishers, although this superiority of English is not always so overwhelming, as shown by research in business translation (R-BuT). After English, we find two large groups of languages, with Spanish, French and German in the lead, and then a mixed group made up of Chinese, Portuguese and Italian. In the case of BITRA, there is likely to be an unfavourable bias for Chinese given the logistical difficulties of collecting Chinese publications from a Western university, so the actual numbers for Chinese will always be higher than the ones shown here.

In terms of differences, the most noteworthy issue is undoubtedly the much greater weight of Spanish in R-TAd and in R-BuT. BITRA is a database produced in Spain which could entail a bias in favour of Spanish. However, we are now comparing groups within the same database and compiled according to the same criteria. Therefore, in principle, it does not make sense that this language bias would change according to the translation mode. For instance, and still based on BITRA, in research in literary translation, Spanish represents 22.0%, whereas in machine translation, research in Spanish is 9.8%, reflecting that language differences actually exist and indicating different degrees of academic dedication within TS in different parts of the world. Thus, it can be confidently stated that in Spanish-speaking countries there is a particularly strong interest in the translation of advertising and economic texts. A reason favouring this concentration is that Spanish-speaking countries are essentially recipients of advertising in the global market, but the same could be said for instance of Italy or Portuguese-speaking countries. Thus, it is likely that there is some kind of special concentration of research groups that will need to be addressed in future studies incorporating affiliation, a piece of information that is not included in BITRA.

3.3. Thematic couplings in R-TAd

A particularly interesting way of describing a line of research is by its relations with other areas, that is, judging it by the company it keeps. The idea now is to see which other topics R-TAd is usually associated with, so that if, for example, it appears much more frequently linked to applied objects than to theoretical ones, its instrumental rather than conceptual nature might be established. This approach can be even more meaningful if the analysis is done with a control element (another thematic pairing) that shows that no proportion is axiomatic. In this case, to make the differences more meaningful, we will compare R-TAd with R-BuT because of their epistemological proximity and because R-BuT is the focus of this special issue.

Due to space constraints, it is impossible to analyse the hundred or so thematic labels included in BITRA, so here we have chosen the 10 most frequently associated topics, first with R-TAD and then with R-BuT, as can be seen in Figures 4 and 5.

A first glance at both graphs shows that research in both lines tends to be applied and to adjust to the peculiarities of their respective languages and modes of communication. Thus, abstract concepts (equivalence, translatability, ideology…) have a very minor presence in both areas, while applied issues (metaphor, proper names, interference, phraseology, terminology, profession, didactics…) occupy the first positions, although in different proportions.

From the point of view of frequency in R-TAd, the large presence of the audiovisual channel, practically absent in R-BuT, is particularly striking. The reasons for this difference seem obvious and can be attributed to the great social weight of advertisements in audiovisual format, a channel which is very much in the minority in economic texts.

Figure 4

**Most frequent thematic couplings in R-TAd vs R-BuT (%)**

Figure 5

**Most frequent thematic couplings in R-BuT vs R-TAd (%)**

Secondly, it is also striking that didactics is among the most frequent pairings in both disciplines (most frequent pairing in R-BuT and second in R-TAd), but at the same time with very disparate ratios. The high presence of didactics in R-TAd (6.4%) is probably due both to the applied nature of this line and to its pedagogical virtues as a modality that is in principle subject to equivalence parameters (“transcreation”) which tend to be very different from those followed in the other modalities. In this sense, TAd presents itself as a particularly interesting modality to integrate into the training of translators who need to be fully aware that their mediation can and often does go far beyond attempting a passive reproduction of the source texts. At the same time, as researchers in TAd often regret, the translation of advertising is practically absent from university curricula as an independent course or module, while business translation often has its own course in most translation degrees or, failing that, appears explicitly as an essential part of courses shared with legal translation. This large weight in translation curricula, together with the applied nature of business translation, would explain the comparatively enormous presence of its didactics (21.4%) in research.

Thirdly, it is worth highlighting what might be termed the humanist vocation of the translation of advertisements as opposed to the more scientific-technical leaning of business translation. This duality is particularly reflected in the notable presence of cultural concerns in R-TAd, which is almost four times greater than in R-BuT. From the opposite perspective, R-BuT gives great importance (fifth place in its pairings) to terminological issues, which are completely absent from R-TAd. Given the doubtless social repercussions of economic translation, this tendency to minimise cultural dimensions in RBuT constitutes a surprising characteristic that should perhaps be rethought. Along the same lines of the importance of specialised (economic) language versus humanist (advertising) discourse, there is practically no corpus research in the translation of advertising, whereas in R-BuT, it is a central component.

Fourthly, and as a further reinforcement of the humanist vocation of advertising discourse, the concern shown by R-TAd towards gender issues, which are hardly addressed in R-BuT, must also be noted. The frequency with which sexist strategies are used to sell products and services, together with the growing social sensitivity in this respect, are an obvious explanation for this relative weight, as opposed to an economic discourse which in theory — although again this is not entirely true — is much more aseptic in this respect.

Fifthly, the focus on professional issues in R-BuT more than doubles that of R-TAd. This difference is hard to explain. It is true that business translation is a sector that employs many more professionals than the translation of ads, but then here we are not comparing absolute figures but relative percentages. As far as we have been able to see in the bibliography, the only explanation that can be inferred to explain this disparity seems to situate it as an extension of the aforementioned difference in the degree of dedication to research in didactics, since a large part of the reflections on the profession of the business translator are simultaneously linked to the components they need for their training.

Sixthly, as regards surprising research gaps, it is worth commenting on the lack of a relationship between localisation and advertising or tourism translation. It seems reasonable to assume that a large part of the translation of websites would be done for advertising or touristic reasons. However, only 1.6% and 2.0% of localisation studies show an explicit interest in the translation of advertising or tourism texts in their titles or abstracts. In contrast, video games appear explicitly 10 times more often, in 21.5% of cases. Given the proximity between the concept of equivalence largely shared by localisation and advertising translation (or transcreation), this lack of a relationship seems surprising and should be addressed in more qualitative studies. These would enable us to discover to what extent this disconnection is real or whether localisation studies do in fact combine with advertising or tourism much more than it seems if judging from titles and abstracts.

Finally, there is the question of specific or microtextual translation problems (phraseology, metaphors, proper names, interference, terminology). Both lines of research include a very notable presence of this type of concern. This is quite usual in the study of translation modalities, one of whose axes is usually the attempt to provide guidelines for the systematic solution of the most typical problems due to their frequency and complexity in that particular mode. The differences between R-TAd and R-BuT refer to what are perceived as the most frequent problems in both discourses. Apart from the aforementioned difference marked by the great presence of terminological reflections in R-BuT as opposed to the absence of a terminology of its own to study in the more humanist advertising discourse, we find that R-BuT pays special attention to the translation of metaphors – a very frequent and significant rhetorical resource in economy-related language –, interference – with many researchers regretting the great ability of English to penetrate other languages – and phraseology – very much linked in this case to this same interference and metaphorical language. In the case of R-TAd, it is the study of proper names that stands out, something obviously essential in advertising, where the need to sell brands revolves around this very problem.

3.4. Authorship patterns in R-TAd

In this section, we will analyse authorship patterns in R-TAd, that is, the degree of specialisation of the authors who deal with this translation mode, their productivity and their tendency to work in teams or individually.

Table 2 shows that once again, and also in R-TAd, there is a clear tendency to comply with Lotka’s law (1926), according to which, in the academic world, only a very limited number of authors specialise in a given subject, producing most of the publications on the subject, while the vast majority of scholars tend to carry out temporary research, without devoting themselves to this line on a consistent basis. If we establish a specialisation threshold above 3 publications per author, so that only authors with more than 3 publications will be considered specialists, the table shows that this condition is only met by 22 authors (5.8%), as compared with the 357 (94.2%) authors who have written 3 or less publications on TAd, almost 80% of whom are one-timers. If the specialisation threshold becomes more demanding and is set above 5, then we are left with 13 (3.4%) truly specialist authors, 25 (6.6%) with a notable interest represented by 3-5 papers and 341 (90.0%) merely occasional authors, with two publications at the most. In this sense, in terms of field-related documentation, it seems clear that in an area with nearly 400 different authors, keeping track of about twenty of them would be enough to keep up to date with specialised reflections.

As regards patterns of collaboration, of the 379 different authors who have published something on R-Tad, there is an average of 1.2 authors per paper, with a total of 88 co-authored publications, that is 18.6%, which is a similar but somewhat higher ratio than for BITRA as a whole (16%). Given that the rate of co-authorship in TS has been rising steadily in recent decades (Rovira-Esteva, Franco Aixelá, et al. 2020), the explanation for this slightly higher rate of collaboration is probably due to the fact that R-TAd is more recent than TS in general, so it is not so burdened by past trends, which leaned more towards single authorship.

Setting the specialist threshold at 4 or more papers on this topic, an interesting fact is that we get 22 different authors, 17 of which are women[1] (77.3%), which makes R-TAd a discipline where women have gained much visibility, at least as far as its specialists are concerned. In this respect, we can compare these percentages with those of research in audiovisual translation (Pérez Escudero 2021), who found that among the 20 most productive authors, the percentage of women in this field was 60%, also clearly higher than world distribution, but much lower than R-TAd. If we reduce the threshold of specialisation to two or more papers, we obtain 79 different authors, of which 49 are women (62%), a ratio that is now very close to that of audiovisual research.

3.5. Impact in R-TAd

In this section we will analyse the impact patterns in terms of citations in R-TAd. To do so, we will focus on the average number of citations received by each document in comparison with BITRA as a whole and we will analyse the ranking of the 10 most cited documents. Before going into the figures and their analysis, there are two important caveats to be made.

Firstly, citations should always be counted in relative terms (citations/year), since in absolute terms (total citations received regardless of the years since publication) older documents have a clear advantage as they have had more time to collect them. At the same time, in order to list the most cited papers with some solidity, it is convenient to establish a minimum of total citations (10 in our case), so that a newly appeared paper that has casually received 2 citations in a single year of existence is not put ahead of others that have collected, say, 15 in the last 10 years.

Secondly, it is very important not to confuse impact with research quality. The citability of a document depends on many factors, most of them quite different from quality. A detailed list of most of these factors can be found in Franco Aixelá (2013), but for reasons of space, suffice it here, to comment, for instance, that the same document will have many more citation possibilities in English than if it is written in Esperanto simply because there will be many more scholars able to understand it and, therefore, to cite it. Similarly, generalist publications, especially handbooks, tend to receive much more attention than case studies, again for reasons linked to their respective potential audience and completely unrelated to the quality of their research (indeed, authors rarely perform any research in handbooks). Despite this, if properly understood, impact remains a useful and significant index, since it is also true that, all other things being equal, impact may be considered indicative of two very significant issues: the potential interest of an essay in comparison with other essays with a similar citability, and the topics and approaches that are most widely followed in the academic world.

Having said all this, the first thing that can be observed in the R-TAd impact analysis is that this line of research is above average as regards academic popularity, since 43.4% of its publications have received at least one citation, while this is only the case for 38.2% of BITRA as a whole. On the other hand, this difference is again likely to be at least partly because the publications in R-TAd tend to be more modern, so that they are not affected by the greater lack of citations of those from before the 1980s. This interpretation is reinforced by the fact that the difference in citability with BITRA becomes progressively smaller and finally disappears as the citation threshold increases. Thus, the initial 5% asymmetry is lowered to 2.5% for documents with 5 or more citations and disappears when we talk about the small range of documents with the highest impact, with 50 or more citations in BITRA. This is again consistent with what has been found so far in the BITRA impact analyses, as specialised research lines tend not to be included in the most cited percentiles because the more specialised, the smaller the number of potentially interested academics.

Table 3

**Highest impact documents in R-TAd**

Table 3 confirms the relative youth of this line of research, whose most cited documents were on average published in 1999.8 (1999 point eight, that is, nearly 2000), which makes them clearly more recent than the ten most cited in the discipline as a whole, still according to BITRA (Franco Aixelá 2013), whose average year is 1985.6, almost fifteen years older.

Table 3 also shows that English is clearly the language with the highest citation rate, with 60% of the most cited documents. However, there are two notable differences in this field with respect to TS as a whole. Thus, in TS, although not all top-impact publications appeared first in English, 100% of the 10 most cited are available in the lingua franca, while the other publication languages of the most cited documents are French (3) and Spanish (3), followed by German (2). In R-Tad, the other languages are Spanish (3) and French (1), with no presence of German. A final language fact that should be mentioned is that a good part of the TS classics (8 out of 10) are translated and available simultaneously in several languages, even when originally written in English. On the contrary, in R-Tad, only the one with the highest impact is available in more than one language (English and Spanish). This seems to indicate the relative interest of research in specialised translation as compared with generalist publications, and a kind of Matthew effect in terms of citability: as cross-disciplinary publications tend to attract more international attention, they are also the ones that are translated into several languages (especially English), increasing their citability, while specialised translation output, with a much smaller target audience, tends to be left untranslated, further reducing its visibility and thus its citability in a kind of vicious circle.

A final important observation regarding impact and R-TAd is the confirmation that books and generalist approaches always have the highest citability rate in TS. Thus, none of the 10 most cited publications is a case study. On the contrary, all of them present generalist approaches, five of them with all the features of handbooks and the others tending to present general overviews of the translation of advertising. Again, we see how research quality is far from being the only factor in citability. If, for example, one is looking for a good manual on the translation of advertising, it makes sense to compare the impact of books of the same type, preferably written in the same language, but it is not meaningful to compare a manual with a case study, since the latter will very probably lose out and the result will have nothing to do with research quality, especially if we take into account that manuals almost never perform research per se, but rather tend to be summaries of the state of the art.

4. Conclusions

Having presented and discussed the main bibliometric data of R-TAd, it is a good moment to go beyond the details and try to provide a global vision by way of a recapitulation. The most important conclusions to be drawn from this study are as follows:

R-TAd is an especially recent academic endeavour. In addition to being part of a discipline which was actually born as autonomous TS in the 1980s and can be already considered relatively young, R-TAd took off a decade later, in the 1990s. A likely cause of this delay is that the translation of advertising tends to follow its own rules, quite apart from the traditional image of translation as a conduit, making it more difficult to systematise and to integrate within traditional models of translation as mere reproduction. Specialised translation in general was a latecomer in translation theory, which for many centuries hardly paid any attention to anything but literary and religious texts. The translation of advertising goes a step further than specialised translation and that meant that many traditional assumptions had to be questioned and overcome before researchers were prepared to pay much attention to it or even recognise its existence.

R-TAd is akin to R-BuT and both share quite a few basic parameters, not least their economy-related nature. However, they have different profiles. Thus, both have a very similar language and impact distribution but whereas R-BuT often delves into larger areas such as didactics or history, R-TAd is more concerned in the way translations (“transcreations”) work and should be made, paying special attention to cultural and ideological issues that R-BuT tends to disregard. Factors such as its not being assigned specialised courses in university curricula, and the lack of a specific terminology in advertisements, seem to help to explain these differences. Also, the frequent combination of R-TAd and audiovisual translation gives it a particular approach that R-BuT does not have.

Regarding its development over time, R-TAd is peculiar not only as a latecomer but also as one of the few TS lines that seems to be at risk of stagnation. We have seen that it is an important field of study, with close to 500 publications detected in BITRA, but for some reason that needs to be further examined, it seems to be losing momentum – not disappearing but becoming gradually less and less cultivated.

All in all, R-TAd is a field of research featuring its own peculiar characteristics, halfway between written and audiovisual translation, favouring radical translation shifts that make some scholars even want to change the translation label for a transcreation one. It is high time we start to pay more bibliometric attention to it because it might shed very interesting surprises, some of which I have tried to point at in this article.

A bibliometric analysis of research on the translation of advertising. An inconstant object of study?

Abstract

Résumé

Resumen

1. Introduction

2. Methodological issues