ABSTRACT
Advertising translation benefits from pragmatics both in research and in professional practice. The first section of this chapter introduces some of the changes that translation studies have undergone under the influence of, or in relation to, pragmatics and presents examples of the pragmatic function of advertising material. In the second part, the multimodal nature of advertisements is discussed as a challenge to pragmatics. The discussion focuses on the range of textual elements that have the potential to generate meaning and the overall persuasive effect that is conditioned by the combination and interplay of these elements, all of which have a decisive influence on the target text. Pragmatic issues such as inference, relevance, presupposition, intended meaning and speech acts are also explored to better understand advertising translation, an activity which entails the production of a target text that may contain different speech acts and trigger different effects on receptors through several reading processes. Finally, I show how reception studies can help to account for the role of receptors in reading advertisements, resulting from the interplay of diverse textual elements, and for the actual meaning that advertisements are assigned through the inferences and presuppositions of receivers, and through the context-in-use norms or textual features.
