Ira Torresi

Women, Water and Cleaning Agents

Abstract Advertising tends to conform to buyers’ sets of values in order to establish a common ground for communication and persuasion, thus fostering the replication of cultural habits. A number of such habits are of special interest to translators, since they are so well-rooted in our consciousness and taken as universal that their culture-specific nature might be overlooked. In particular, a superficial translation of advertising texts centred upon such ‘hidden’ stereotypes might result in marketing disaster. Translators should therefore make sure that they activate their cultural mediation resources as well as their linguistic skills when working on advertising texts. A useful practice in this regard is to undertake an in-depth and critical review of a recent corpus of advertisements in the target language/culture. A comparative analysis of several corpora from different cultural areas might provide an even better understanding of stereotypes and reveal their relative, culture-specific nature. This paper offers a pilot analysis of British, Italian and Russian advertisements for cleaning products and investigates the cultural stereotype of cleanliness emerging from them, highlighting culture-specific traits and commenting on their possible origin.

The polysystem and the postcolonial: The wondrous adventures of James Joyce and his Ulysses across book markets

The allegedly obscene content of Joyces Ulysses caused the book to be censored for over a decade in the Anglo-American world. Today, however, Ulysses is considered a “classic”, making one wonder what promoted it from the periphery to the centre of polysystems worldwide. This article uses the figure of James Joyce and the success of his Ulysses to explore issues of marginality/centrality in the postcolonial sense and in the interpretation provided by polysystem theory, integrated here with Appadurais notion of scapes. It begins by addressing the notions of “the classic”, “the canon” and “centrality” within a polysystem. It then discusses the role of institutions and translators in placing Ulysses and its author at the centre of the Irish and Italian polysystems in particular, and finally probes into the role of (re)translation in protecting the postcolonially subversive potential of the novel from the risk of becoming mainstream once it becomes central in a polysystem.