Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Advertising:A Cross-cultural Perspective

Advertising is by no means just a business expenditure undertaken in the hope of moving some merchandise off the store shelves, but is rather a cultural meaning communication process, having an intrinsic relationship with certain culture.Advertising is continually expanding to maintain a significant archive of a country抯 history, customs, values, national character etc., suggesting the basic characteristics of a culture in the more comprehensive and detailed extent. Through a kaleidoscope of commercial messages, it tells the story of one country抯 journey from ancient days to modem times and gives us a full view of whatever the culture has created and whatever concepts and ideals the culture advocates. Advertising is vanguard to implant or transform cultural beliefs, values, attitudes, and actions.Advertising creation in different countries, which is deep-rooted in its cultural environment, has been implanted with certain cultural ideas. Although the function of advertising is the same throughout the world, the expression of its message varies in different cultural settings, i.e. advertising is culturally relevant. This issue cannot be overlooked in international advertising involving language concerns. At the turn of 21st century, the cross-cultural communication has rapidly increased. International advertising serves as a bridge introducing our products to outside world and making our culture known by other peoples. To be successful in international relationships, we must recognize differences as resources. 揂n exact copy of ourselves can only multiply our own flaws梩he differences of others can provide a renewed insight.敀This thesis attempts to discuss the English and Chinese advertising in a cross-cultural perspective in the hope that the findings may be of some help to Chinese advertising professionals. ItCarley H. Dodd. 1995 Dynamics of Intercultural communication 4th cd. NY: Brownis organized as follows.Chapter one surveys the views of advertising and presents a thorough review of the preceding studies of advertising. Adverting has been a focus of interest in linguistic circle for decades and a considerable amount of literature has been accumulating. However, few current studies make systematic research on cultural aspects in advertising, let alone do the contrastive analysis of Chinese and English advertising in the cultural perspective. Thus I will venture to do a tentative study in this field.Chapter two highlights the interplay between culture and advertising. On one hand, advertising is not only a marketing tool but also a social actor and a cultural artifact, reflecting certain attitudes, behaviors and values, and reinforcing certain lifestyles and philosophies that help sell commodities; on the other hand, advertising can produce, transmit, or initiate cultural resources; reinforce or maintain elements of culture in our existing communities, and repair or restore to a healthy state our cultural coherence when ruptures in our communities threaten to tear, apart our society.Chapter three makes efforts to make a contrastive analysis of English and Chinese ads in the cultural perspective, based on an opinion survey and a collected corpus of English and Chinese ads, with the purpose of finding some cultural differences and similarities as well. The survey indicates that American ads and Chinese ads have certain differences in the values they advocate, and share some cultural universals as well. For example, individualism is more dominant in the American ads, whereas filial piety, family affection and patriotism are values more prevalent in Chinese ads. The study on the basis of a collected corpus is made at lexical, syntactical, rhetoric and discourse levels of advertising language respectively. Through the close examination of the advertisements of the two remote languages at various levels, we may find that the ways of expressing advertising messages are culturally-loaded.Chapter four deals with the advertising creation in the international circumstances. In e...