A Small Qualitative Study on the Translation of Ethical Messages of the Global Cosmetics Advertisements

In recent years, the global corporations have pursued ethical management which emphasizes socio-ethical values, unlike the management strategies aiming at financial growth of the past. This new management paradigm also affects the advertising market. It means the focus of the market has been shifted from the customer satisfaction and products to what kinds of socio-ethical values can be practiced through the products. However, in Translation Studies, this new advertising paradigm has not yet got its attention as an academic theme. Therefore, the researcher examined the aspect of advertisement reflecting the socio-ethical values, which global corporations are focusing on and have recently been perceived by the above-mentioned changes in times, from the viewpoint of translation.
Based on this background, the present study aims to show how the ethical messages such as ‘animal protection’, ‘environmental protection’, and ‘fair trade’ of global cosmetics advertisements are translated into Korean. In this purpose, each of the six pairs of English-Korean cosmetics advertisements was compared and analyzed in great detail based on Gideon Toury’s Descriptive Translation Studies. Especially, both verbal and visual signs of the advertisements were carefully studied when analyzing the ethical messages.
There are four hypotheses that can be suggested by the result. First, the ethical messages of the English advertisement tends to be deleted or its meaning is mostly weakened when translated into Korean.
Second, deletion or weakening of ethical messages occurs in verbal signs. The ethical messages carried by the verbal signs of the English advertisement tend to be reconstructed, when translated, in a way that emphasizes the functions, features, and components of the product being advertised.
Third, deletion or weakening of ethical messages also occurs in visual signs. The visual signs that represent the ethical messages of the English advertisement are mostly deleted when translated into Korean; instead the image of the product itself becomes more emphasized. It is often reconfigured with other visual signs that can enhance the advantage of the product.
Fourth, deletion or attenuation of ethical messages may be caused by different verbal signs, even when they share the same visual signs. It means that the ethical messages are sometimes weakened or deleted according to the characteristics of the advertisement messages generated by the interaction of the verbal and visual signs.
The hypotheses proposed in this study are still limited to verify its reliability as the analysis was carried out with six pairs of English-Korean advertisements, thus, the size of the data produced is too small. Therefore, it is necessary to verify the validity of the proposed hypotheses through further studies securing sufficient data, and thus, to expand the scope of the study. Hopefully this study could serve as a meaningful start of the further related studies.