Advertising across Cultures: A Linguistic Approach

„Advertising is an exciting interdisciplinary field of study that is at the border of economics, linguistics, sociology, psychology and cross-cultural communication. Advertising language has aroused the interest of advertisers, whose aim is to communicate effectively with their audience and persuade it, of sociologists, who are interested in its effect on the behaviour and values of society, or of psychologists, who are interested in its effect on individual motivations.

Many linguists have written about the language of advertising and beginning with the seventies of the previous century, with the development of globalisation, some of them have focused on advertising adaptation. They have paid attention to the translator’s profile or they have given consideration to the relationship between the image of an advertisement, its text and the target culture. For example, Sidiropoulou (1998) and Taronna (2006) have compared Greek and Italian ads with British ads which advertise the same product.

To the best of my knowledge, as far as the Romanian context and language is concerned, no empirical research into the subject of ‘adaptation vs. standardisation of advertising messages’ has been conducted by Romanian linguists so far. Therefore, the purpose of my book is to point out similarities and differences between British, American, Australian and Romanian advertisements that promote products launched internationally.”

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