Gender Representations in Commercials – Original and Translation

Book excerpt: Within the interdisciplinary framework of gender, translation, and advertising, this study investigates gender representations of fictional characters in original and translated audiovisual advertisements. Stavroula (Stave) Vergopoulou discusses various manifestations of sexism on verbal and/or nonverbal levels. She also explores the ways in which translators can reduce or mitigate linguistic sexism in advertising translation to foster gender-fair language use. Her research draws on sociocultural linguistics and particularly on a social constructionist approach to gender identities. The exploration of the relationship(s) of gender and advertising and the discussion of the key concept of translation form the theoretical basis for the empirical research work. For this, English and German commercials from 2017 to 2020 have been examined along with their English, German, and Greek target texts.