Translating customer identity in male cosmetics advertising
Addressee identity awareness often affects how speakers structure discourses. The study views male cosmetics
advertising through a pragmatic lens to investigate how customer identity is shaped cross-culturally through men’s deodorant
advertisements on the English and Greek market. The study uses communication styles (
Hofstede,
Hofstede, and Minkov 2010) to account for (a) naturalistic translation shifts in verbal or multimodal data which tend
to improve product reception in the Greek target context and (b) experimental data to confirm how masculinity is shaped and
attributed to male customers by well renowned deodorant companies. The data analysis reveals that socio-pragmatic parameters are
operative in accounting for differences in the two contexts. Findings show cross-cultural variation along three of
Hofstede, Hofstede, and Minkov’s (2010) communication styles, namely,
individualism/collectivism, masculinity/femininity and uncertainty avoidance/tolerance, correlating it with a fourth dimension of
the framework, the high/low power distance one. The significance of the research lies in that it shows how commercial content
producers register locally shared gender identity assumptions relevant to the audience type they address. Translation is another
platform where pragmatic variation may be fruitfully explored cross-culturally.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Literature review
- 3.Methodology
- 4.Data analysis
- 4.1Masculinity vs. femininity
- 4.2Individualism vs. collectivism
- 4.3Uncertainty avoidance/tolerance
- 5.Discussion and significance of research
- Notes
-
References
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Data sources