Advertising translation and symbolic violence: The post-translations of Western beauty standards in Estée Lauder campaigns

In global times, where languages are hybrid and visual, it is vital to broaden the definition of translation to study current and new challenges, as the ones posed by advertising. Taking the last theories in Translation Studies, and the concept of post-translation coined by Gentzler as a key notion in our methodology, our aim is to analyse the rewritings of women in European advertising of Estée Lauder; understanding the female body as a text and a semiotic sign which communicates meanings and ideologies, and which is, therefore, subject to translation. Through an analysis of current campaigns, in terms of year of publication as well as language-based between Spanish, English and French versions of the ads, we will observe how magazines aimed at women and the ads included construct a homogenised, stable and controlled identity, which makes of the female body a site of pressure and constant dissatisfaction, a space where power is represented. On those grounds, another aim is to expose the symbolic violence perpetuated by these campaigns, as long as they promote impossible thin and young bodies and represent only certain races, which ends up with a considerable number of women feeling that they deviate from the Western beauty canon, a beauty standard which is taken as an original to be translated into other peripheric cultures and bodies.