English print advertisements for cosmetic and hygienic products and their Persian translations: A critical discourse analysis

Advertising is an important part of marketing and greatly influences the way people behave and think. It communicates information about products and at the same time tries to persuade people to buy them, which makes the translation of advertising materials a challenging, yet necessary task. Using critical discourse analysis, this study aims to examine English print advertisements for cosmetic and hygienic products and their Persian translations. The sample consists of seven matching pairs selected from brochures and catalogs available at Isfahan drugstores between 2010 and 2012. Fairclough’s framework (2010) is adopted to analyze verbal elements. In order to analyze the visual components of advertisements, Johnson’s (2008) approach to the study of advertisements is employed. The analyzed data reveals significant differences between the source and target texts in terms of their textual, discoursal, and ideological features.