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Glocalization and English Mixing in Advertising in Taiwan

Its Discourse Domains, Linguistic Patterns, Cultural Constraints, Localized Creativity, and Socio-psychological Effects

Jia-Ling Hsu is at Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Taiwan University, 1 Roosevelt Road, Sec. 4, Taipei, Taiwan. E-mail: jlhsu{at}ntu.edu.tw

This article intends to provide a socio-linguistic profile of the role and impact of English in advertising in Taiwan in an era of globalization, by integrating results obtained from discourse analysis, readers’ attitudinal surveys, and copywriters’ interviews. Results show that from copywriters’ advertising design to consumers’ underlying psychology, English has consistently cast its magic spell even on the English-illiterate public. Regardless of one's proficiency or literacy in English, English mixing mainly represents attention-getting, internationalism, premium quality, and the trendy taste of the younger generation, and in addition, a graphic design for real estate advertisers. However, specific socio-psychological features of English correlate with the language ratios of code-mixing in advertising copy, product type, and the public's level of English proficiency. Furthermore, the charm of English is culturally and linguistically constrained. Culturally, English does not agree with the advertising of traditional products. Linguistically, English mixing is best received with the bilingual advertising copy composed of easy-to-read vocabulary. Existing alongside the globalization of the local marketing discourse is the localization of English, which is mainly characterized by verbatim translation of Chinese grammatical structure into English. Participants’ evaluation of localized English patterns correlates with their English proficiency. Overall, in spite of the public's generally low proficiency in English, it is predicted that English mixing will continue to flourish in advertising in Taiwan.

Journal of Creative Communications, Vol. 3, No. 2, 155-183 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/097325860800300203


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