The Exploitation of Translation in Talking Customers into Purchasing Products: A Critical Investigation of English-Persian Advertising Brochures for Household Appliances

The present study sets out to conduct a critical investigation into what linguistic strategies are exploited during the translation of English advertising brochures for household appliances into Persian to manipu- late customers to purchase the respective products. In the pursuit of this goal, it seeks to explore the val- ues that have been added to the Persian version of the translated brochures. In doing so, a number of 35 English advertising brochures for household appliances for which the Persian translation were available in the market were randomly selected and then analyzed based on the three-dimensional model developed by Fairclough (1989). Accordingly, the data are analyzed with respect to the linguistic strategies em- ployed during the translation process. To comply with the requirements of the next two dimensions of the model, afterwards, the results are interpreted and explained. The findings suggest that the translators ef- fect certain linguistic changes in transitivity structure, vocabulary and grammatical features while trans- lating the brochures. Furthermore, the results reveal that various values like caring about customer‟s en- joyment and convenience, ensuring customers about their purchases, maintaining a formal link between manufacturers and customers, paving the way for better understanding of the source texts by reducing the sentences and preferring an indirect speech towards customers in the target texts than the source texts are conveyed to the target texts by translators.