Building Cohesive Ties in Multimodal Advertising Texts: cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspectives

This research explores the way meaning-building works in dynamic commercial advertising texts based on the English language and the way these texts are rendered for the Russian-speaking target audience. Commercial ads are seen as multimodal texts whose function is to impact the recipients and to induce them to make the “necessary” purchasing choices. To this end, designers creatively employ linguistic resources along with impressive visual images and music. The purpose of the study is to examine cohesive ties built among semiotically heterogeneous elements in the original multimodal advertising texts and in their translated versions. Our research is set in the framework of Multimodal Discourse Analysis, social semiotics and multimodal translation. This empirical study explores dynamic advertising texts of leading multinational brands such as IKEA, Nike etc., focusing on a case study of the Lego ad Don’t Stop us Now (2021) and its Russian localization. The findings reveal that meaning-building in dynamic promotional texts is underpinned by the following types of cohesive ties: 1) intrasemiotic ones that exist within each semiotic mode, 2) intersemiotic ties among verbal and non-verbal elements of a multimodal text, 3) intertextual ties between an advertising text and a broad sociocultural context. For the multimodal translation to be successful all types of cohesion should be taken into consideration.