Translation Strategies in Consumer-Oriented Texts: Are They Always TT-Oriented?

This paper aims to analyse translation strategies in consumer-oriented texts involving the English-Arabic language pair on two scales, a general scale in light of Newmark's (1981) semantic and communicative strategies and a cultural scale under Venuti's (1995/2008/2018) two orientations in translation strategies, domestication and foreignization, to determine both overall and cultural tendencies of the chosen data. The study adopts a functional translation approach as a theoretical framework that serves to determine the purpose of employing different strategies at the macro-level. This examination helps to evaluate whether consumer-oriented texts lean towards a TT reader, i.e., having more communicative and domestication translation rather than semantic and foreignization translation. The results reveal that both semantic and communicative translation frequently occur in the general translation procedures used in the data of GCC in-flight magazines, which are used as a data sample of consumer-oriented texts. As for cultural strategies, the analysis shows that domestication is the predominant cultural strategy when translating these texts, occurring in around 98% of total cultural procedures.