Cultural Differences In Chinese And English Advertising Languages

As both an economic and a cultural phenomenon, advertisement has beencarefully designed to meet particular needs of human beings. Economically speaking,advertisement is a marketing tool used to advertise products or services and helpadvertisers to obtain profits by persuading customers to take purchase action. As faras cultural phenomenon is concerned, advertisement constitutes one of the ways ofintercultural communication. It is culturally oriented and framed, reflecting thevalues and cultural preferences of a nation and its people. Advertisement takesadvertising language as the most important form, by which the general culturaltrends of a society is reflected. Advertising language is a language differing from dailyutterances, carrying distinctive stylistic features and having a unique way ofrepresentation, so deserving a systematic study. In order to reveal the culturaldifferences between Chinese and American advertising languages, linguistic andintercultural communication theories are incorporated. Also, Coca-Cola and Nike areemployed in this thesis as two specific cases to make an intercultural analysis ofcultural differences between Chinese and American advertisements.Advertisement is culture bound. Associating advertisement with culture can notonly enrich the symbolic connotation of advertisement, but also helps to win theaudience. Advertising language is major expressive form of advertisement, throughwhich people perceive differences and capture specific features of different cultures.By an intercultural analysis, this paper reports that there are striking differences inChinese and American cultural values as well as in their ways of representation.Besides, the present study still finds that the differences in cultural values greatlyshape the creation and interpretation of advertisement and its language, and thatcultural factors play an important role in achieving commercial success and effectiveintercultural communication. Hence, ad-makers need to develop interculturalawareness. Based on the intercultural analysis of Chinese and American advertisinglanguage, this thesis concludes that the cultural value difference is the mostdistinctive differences between Chinese and American cultures, as well as a major factor that shapes the creation as well as the interpretation of advertisement and itslanguage.