Awareness-raising campaigns on human rights: A bilingual contrastive analysis of Italian and English ads

This dissertation provides a bilingual contrastive analysis of Italian and English awareness-raising campaigns about Human Rights. Promotional communication has become increasingly influential and effective over the years. Besides providing a definition of promotional communication and exploring its main purposes and functions, advertisements’ structure will be analysed. The focus will then shift to the specific topic of the thesis, i.e. awareness raising campaigns on human rights, to explain the nature, social function and creation process. Drawing on three different translation approaches, i.e. localization, transcreation and translation, I will examine the promotional communication language of the various associations and non-governmental organizations and their approaches to different cultures by focusing on linguistic and translational aspects. An analysis of the type of language used in promotional communication will then follow. The purpose is to demonstrate the impossibility of translating the same message without readjusting the text, taking into consideration the linguistic, cultural and social aspects of a particular target culture.