Presentation of the Peugeot 2008 in France, Portugal and Brazil: translation and adaptation

Abstract

Multinational companies and their cross-border products and identities represent interesting objects of study for Translation Studies. When a product launched in a new market requires a “new” advertising campaign, one would think that it might be “inspired” from campaigns already existing in other markets. Thus, when Peugeot launched its new “global” vehicle in Brazil, it was expected that the French car manufacturer would have re-used European texts. In this study, we made use of methodologies from Descriptive Translation Studies to compare online company product presentations in three markets: the French, Portuguese and Brazilian ones. The relationship between the French and the Portuguese websites is mostly literal correspondence, while the Brazilian website is more adapted (free translation). Since linguistic factors alone cannot explain such differences, we are prompted to try and identify more parameters in order to better understand the Brazilian textual dynamics.