Persian version of my blog post about English as the non-language of globalization.
Translated by Niloufar Behrooz (نیلوفر بهروز)

(نوشتار شماره ٢ در مجموعه نوشتار های کوتاه درباره ی نشانه های چند زبانه)

اغلب تابلوهایی كه در مكان هایِ عمومیِ حالِ حاضر يافت می شوند جنبه ی تجاری دارند. اين نوعی روشِ تبليغات است و انتخابِ لغات در تابلوهایِ تجاری از جمله اسامیِ مغازه ها و فروشگاه ها به خوبی بيانگر ارزشهایِ مرتبط با يك زبان خاص مي باشد. هدف اصلی اين است كه معنایِ ضمنیِ نامِ فروشگاه به گونه ای باشد كه مشتری های زيادی را جذب كند. از يك چشم اندازِ چند زبانه، نشانه هایِ جالب آن هایی هستند که در آن ها از زبانی غير از زبانِ پیش فرض – زبانِ رسمي يك مكانِ خاص – استفاده شده باشد. در بيشتر دنيایِ غيرِ انگليسی زبان علامت هایِ انگليسی البته باعث مباهاتِ آن مكان شده وانگليسی به طور گسترده ای با مفاهيمی چون نوين گری، پيشرفت، جهانی سازی و مصرف گرايی پيوند خورده است. در حالی كه زبانهای غير انگليسی غالبا نشانگر كليشه های قومی هستند، انگليسی نشانگر يك كليشه یِ اجتماعی است (همان طور كه با شرح جزئيات در اين مقاله به آن پرداخته ام). اين به اين معناست كه انگليسی قرار نيست همان طور كه  فرانسوی یا ايتاليايی برای آغشتنِ یک داد وستدِ اقتصادی به رنگ و بویِ فرانسوی و ايتاليايی مورد استفاده قرار می گیرد، يكسری كيفيتِ بريتانيايی و آمريكايیِ کلیشه ای را تبليغ كند.

ارتباط زبان انگليسی با مصرف گرايی به طور كامل در تابلویِ اين فروشگاه در فرودگاهِ مونيخ مشخص شده است. مونيخ پايتختِ باواريا يكي از ايالات ساختار فدرال آلمان است. لغتِ آلمانیِ موردِ استفاده برای باواريا بايرن (Bayern) است و بخش اول Bay-ern دقيقا مثل كلمه یِ انگليسیِ Buy (خريدن) تلفظ مي شود. اسم ِ فروشگاه نوعی معمایِ لفظی ِ به تمامِ معناست. رنگ ملی باواريا، يعني آبي، در پس زمينه یِ لوزی شکلِ تابلو روابط ملی (گرایانه) را تقویت می کند. به عنوان كسی كه در باواريا بزرگ شده، با پيش فرضی از نماد ملی كه در بچگی به من القا شده بود، عكس العملِ ناخودآگاهِ من اما نسبت به اين تابلو از نوع وحشت و رنجش بود.

زبان انگليسی در اين تابلو به وضوح هيچ گونه ارتباطی با هيچ كشور انگليسی زبانی ندارد، بلكه انگليسی را به نمادِ ملیِ ناحیه ای غيرِ انگليسی زبان، يعنی باواريا، پيوند مي دهد و مردمِ آن ناحیه را به عنوان يك هدف مصرفی عرضه مي كند. کالاهایِ موجود در اين فروشگاه از انواعِ سوغات به شمار مي آيند، سوغاتِ باواريايي، آلمانی، اروپايی، فرودگاهی، كريسمسی ( من اين عكس را نوامبر سال پيش گرفتم) و چيزهای ديگری كه تنها برایِ خريده شدن آن جا هستند. بخريد!

مثل بسياری از فرودگاه های ديگر، انگليسی اين مكان را به نا-فضایی برای مصرف ِ مفرط، گردشِ مفرط و نماد هایِ ملیِ مفرط تبديل می سازد. انگليسی زبانِ جهانی سازی است؛ در این شکی نیست اما جهاني سازیِ هيچ-چيز، همان طور که جورج ریتزر به ما می گوید! آيا اين به اين معناست كه انگليسی زبانِ هيچ-چيز است؟ نا-افرادی در نا-مکانی سرگرم ِ خریدنِ نا-چیزهایی در نا-برخوردهایِ تجاری و با استفاده از یک نا-زبان؟

References

Piller, I. (2003). ADVERTISING AS A SITE OF LANGUAGE CONTACT Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 23 DOI: 10.1017/S0267190503000254

Ritzer, G. (2007). The globalization of nothing 2 Thousand Oaks, CA, & London: Sage.

Language in the catfish war

I’ve just read False Economy and in addition to learning many new intriguing things about economic history, I’ve also learnt that the catfish war, was, inter alia, fought on the terrain of language. Never heard about the catfish war?! The catfish war is a trade war between the USA and Vietnam, which started in the mid-1990s and in which US catfish producers lobbied for trade barriers and tariffs be imposed on Vietnamese catfish imports.

Initially, US catfish lobbyists delivered a heavy blow to Vietnamese catfish producers when they convinced US lawmakers to implement a law that banned imported catfish from being called “catfish.” Both the US and Vietnamese fish are in the same order of Siluriformes but in different families.

However, their joy didn’t last long because the Vietnamese retaliated by rebranding their catfish as basa. “Basa” is simply the Vietnamese word for the fish in question. First they didn’t have a coherent strategy and so other names also proliferated, including tra, bocourti, panga and swai. Panga, which is mostly used in Europe, derives from the Latin family name Pangasiidae. Basa and tra are different subfamilies – basa is technically known as Pangasius bocourti (hence the trade name bocourti) and tra is technically known as Pangasius hypophthalmus. The Vietnamese word for Pangasius hypophthalmus is tra and the Thai word for it is swai (hence the trade names tra and swai).

It was all very confusing (it took me a good two hours of internet research to figure this all out), particularly as basa is used internationally for both Pangasius bocourti and Pangasius hypophthalmus, and the same is true for panga in Europe. However, since 2010 Vietnam has instituted legislation to label all basa and tra for export consistently as basa.

The Vietnamese strategy of market differentiation worked. In the past decade, basa has come to be seen as an imported premium product and has been doing well in a range of export markets, including the USA. Consequently, US catfish lobbyists changed their strategy: they went to lobby for basa to be treated as a “like product” – i.e. completely reversing their earlier strategy which had been to argue that Vietnamese catfish was different from American catfish. They were successful again and Vietnamese basa has been subjected to heavy import tariffs.

As a discussion paper by the Center for International Management and Development Antwerp explains, the catfish war has transformed Vietnamese aquaculture: export markets have diversified beyond the USA, basa and tra are now being farmed in large agribusinesses, who have the means to innovate and to impose quality controls and to produce to international standards (another strategy in the catfish war has been to allege the inferior quality of Asian catfish and aquaculture).

The catfish war is not the only trade war fought on the terrain on language. Trade names have significant implications for competitiveness and consumer protection, particularly in the seafood business where new species continue to be bred and where the final product on the supermarket shelf has often undergone substantial technological intervention and transformation from animal to food.

The catfish war continues. US catfish producers have recently released a new catfish product, specially filleted premium catfish, under the car-name-like trade name Delacata. However, by now both US and Vietnamese catfish producers are more worried about competition from China than from each other.

In the meantime, if you ask Australian fish-and-chip vendors what kind of fish they use and where it comes from, they tell you: “Dunno! It comes in a box” Do you know what your food is and where it comes from?

London Dairy ad on a building in Abu Dhabi, UAE

Igloo ad on truck in Abu Dhabi, UAE

به تازگى به يك پايان نامه ی کارشناسی ارشدِ نوشته شده در دانشگاهِ آفريقاى جنوبى در سال ٢٠٠٦ که درباره ی تبليغاتِ مربوط به فست فود در کشور عربستان تحقیق کرده بود برخوردم. نويسنده، ال آقا، به اين مهم رسيده بود كه:

” ٩٧% پاسخ دهنده ها عقيده داشتند كه ترجمه ها در زبان عربى غير قابل فهم هستند. ٣درصد باقيمانده گفتند كه گاهى ترجمه ها را مي فهمند” (ص. ٩٢.)

حتی اگر اندازه ی مجموعه ی تحقیق نسبتا كوچك است، نتايجِ شگفت آوری در آن وجود دارد: در حقیقت نویسنده اظهار می دارد كه تمام جميتى كه هدفِ يك پيام تبليغاتى هستند آن پیام را متوجه نمي شوند. جای تعجب نيست كه عرب زبانان اغلب از اينكه زبانِ عربى با انگليسى “آلوده” (اصطلاحی که نویسنده انتخاب می کند، ص. ٨٢) شده است ناراحتند.  ال آقا به اين  نکته اشاره مي كند كه روش مورد استفاده برای ترجمه در مجموعه ی تبليغاتی او نویسه گردانی است و نه ترجمه. نویسه گردانی در جای ديگرى در جهان عرب هم يافت مي شود. اين چهار مثال را در نظر بگیرید. من دو عكس اول را در ابوظبى گرفتم. عكس سوم در قاهره گرفته شده و توسط گولف نیوز منتشر شده.  عكس چهارم را هم، با نهايت تعجب، در مونيخ گرفتم.    

وجه اشتراك اين نشانه ها این است كه دو زبانی به نظر مي رسند حال آنكه در واقع تک زبانی در دو ساختار نوشتاری متفاوت هستند.

لاندن دِیری درساختار نوشتاری عربی و لاتين همان لاندن دِیری نوشته می شود. اگلوو نيز درساختار نوشتاري اين زبان ها همان  اگلوو است. مکدونالدز و سمارت نيز دراين زبان ها همان مکدونالدز و سمارت نوشته مي‌شوند. مکدونالدز ممكن است تك زبانی به نظر برسد اما اين فقط به اين خاطر است كه نه نسخه ی لاتينی و نه نسخه ی سيريليك كه زينت بخش فروشگاه مکدونالدز در ماريين پلازِ مركزیِ مونيخ هستند، درتصوير گنجانده نشده اند.

Clothing store in Cairo, Egypt; source: http://bit.ly/duKNKV

McDonald’s outlet in Munich, Germany

بعضي از اين نويسه گردانی ها راحت تر از بقیه با الگوهای زبان عربی سازگار مي شوند اما تمامی آن ها مي تونند لغات قرضی محسوب شده و جزیی نامتعارف و بيگانه را در اين زبان جا دهند. بدون تعجب، ‌بعضي از عرب زبانان این لغات را آزار دهنده مي‌دانند. ال آقا ادعا می ‌كند كه اين نوع تبليغات بلادرنگ “توسط فرهنگ مقصد رد می شود” (ص.vi) .  در مورد این ادعا اطمینان قطعی ندارم با توجه به اينكه می بینم چقدر اين کار متداول است ورستوران های فست فود با چه رونقی درمنطقه مشغول کسب وکارند.

البته، انتقال نام های تجاری از يك عرصه ی زباني به عرصه ی ديگر ذاتاً دشواراست به این دلیل که ضرورتِ حفظِ نام تجاری به منظور شناخته شدن آن با ضرورتِ پاسخگو بودن به ویژگی های بازار مقصد درتضاد است. بسياري از مردم بعضي از اسامي بی مسمی ِ عجیب را شنيده و مورد تمسخر قرارداده اند. اسم هایی مثل پاجرو كه شركت میتسوبیشی قبل از معرفي آن به كشورهاي آمريكاي لاتين، زحمت چك كردن معناي آن را به خود نداد (پاجرو معادل يك فحشِ چهار حرفی دربعضي كشورهای منطقه است). فورد هم زمانی كه نُوا را به اسپانيايی زبان ها معرفي كرد، مرتكب همين اشتباه شد (نُوا در زبان اسپانيايي به معناي حركت نكردن است). من درپايان نامه ی دكتری خود يك فصل را به غلط های فاحشِ نام هایِ تجاریِ بين زباني اختصاص داده ام كه از قسمت منابع قابل دسترسي است. با اين حال، ‌اشتباهاتي از اين قبيل اساساً مربوط هستند به دوره ی قديمي، غيرحرفه اي و ابتدايي تر تبليغات، مطمئناً پيش از ظهور بازاریابی تنوع گرا (سياست همخوانی تبلیغات با گوناگونی مخاطب).

بازگردانی مکدونالدز به چند زبان (آيا بازگردانیِ چند زبانی می تواند اصطلاحی براي اين پديده باشد؟) درمونيخ واضح ترین مثال برای تدبیری است كه تا به امروز به آن رسیده ام: تلاشی آشكار برای نشان دادن تنوع به صورت نشانه ای توسط يكی از متحدالشكل ترين کمپانی های جهان.

برعكس نام های تجاری برجسته ايالات متحده همچون مکدونالدز كه درپي فاصله گرفتن سمبولیک (نشانه ای) خود از همه ی انواع سلطه، ازجمله سلطه زبانی هستند،‌ تا بتوانند تجارت سلطه گرانه ی خود را ادامه دهند، فروشگاه هاي كوچك محلي همچون سمارت درقاهره به پشتوانه و اعتبار زبان انگليسی برای جذب مشتری دلگرم هستند.

Frontpage of the IT section of the Jam-e Jam newspaper, Iran

يكي از دلايلي كه من اساساً موافق نويسه گردانی نيستم، جعلي و تقليدی بودن نام های تجاریست . سطح اين نشانه های چند زباني را اندکی خراش دهید و تك زبانی انگلیسی را در پس آن مشاهده کنید. با اين حال، من يك نمونه از نام های نوشته شده به چند زبان را در مجموعه ی اطلاعاتم دارم كه نه از جهان عرب، بلكه از ايران است : نام  بخش آی تی (فناوري اطلاعات ) روزنامه ی ايرانیِ جام جم، کلیک نام دارد. کلیک واژه ای فراتر از يك نويسه گردانی ساده است از آن جايی كه می تواند به هر دو صورت خوانده شود:

از راست به چپ بخوانيد، درساختار نوشتاری زبان عربي کلیک به دست مي‌آيد و از چپ به راست هم کلیک درساختار نوشتاری زبان لاتين حاصل مي شود. ابتكارِ چند زبانی به بهترين نحوش!

كسي  هست که مثال هايي از نويسه برگردانِ نام هایِ تجاری و تبليغات داشته باشد؟ من هميشه برای افزايش مجموعه ی خود به حالتِ آماده باشم.

Al Agha, Basem Abbas (2006). The translation of fast-food advertising texts from English into Arabic Unpublished MA dissertation, University of South Africa

Multilingualism sells! Some forms of multilingualism that is. In the world of marketing, languages operate like brands: they are a signifier for something else but they are devoid of substance. To phrase it in Marxist terminology: the exchange value of languages has in some contexts come to overshadow their use value.

This biscuit packaging is part of my banal nationalism collection. However, in contrast to the products marked as “Australian” I reported on recently, the national imagery that these biscuits are infused with is not the one of Australia but of France. As the biscuits are sold in Australia, it is the imagery of another nation that the French name, the French slogan and the French description associate the product with.

The bilingualism on the package makes it actually unnecessary to understand any French for the French imagery to work its magic. And in case you don’t know that the language is French and that you are supposed to associate the biscuits with France, and Europe more generally, the package spells it out for you: “glossy, rich, European chocolate, paired with an oh-so-French butter biscuit;” “chocolat européen riche et brilliant, recouvrant un biscuit au beurre si délicieusement français.”

The French language on this product, on the supermarket shelf, works because it is nothing but a stereotype: a stereotype about delicious French cuisine and sophisticated European savoir vivre. The product promises to bring these qualities to Australia and to let the consumer partake of them. Eating a petit écolier (which, for the non-French speakers among you, incidentally, translates as “little schoolboy” – does that ruin your appetite a bit?) promises to make you feel a bit more cultured, a bit more sophisticated, a bit as if you were on that holiday in Paris that the travel brochures and media make you dream about. Eyeing the package you can even feel like a sophisticated multilingual French speaker: “milk chocolate/chocolat au lait”, “European biscuits/biscuits européen” – by the looks of it French is not that difficult!

Marketing and advertising messages such as these work because they are embedded in the discourses of banal nationalism and because the foreign language works not as a conveyor of content but as the empty shell of a stereotype: just like a brand in fact. The product brand’s website makes this very clear with a page devoted to “how to speak LU.” There you can click on a short list of French words (chocolatier, petit beurre etc.) and listen to their French pronunciation.

And if you aren’t convinced yet that French has become nothing but a brand in this context, check out which international corporation LU belongs to: the US multinational Kraft!

LEE, J. (2006). Linguistic constructions of modernity: English mixing in Korean television commercials Language in Society, 35 (01) DOI: 10.1017/S0047404506060039

PILLER, I. (2001). Identity constructions in multilingual advertising Language in Society, 30 (2), 153-186 DOI: 10.1017/S0047404501002019

Signage not only appears in public space. Through our consumption of all kinds of products, we bring a multiplicity of signs into our homes. In this slide show, I’ve assembled images of a range of breakfast foods: cornflakes, yoghurt, bagels, cheese, apple juice, and a cup of tea. The packaging tells us what kind of food we have in front of us and also some nutritional information. However, beyond that factual information they are graced with national imagery. The Australian flag appears on the cornflakes box, the cheese slices and the apple juice; an outline of the Australian map appears on the yoghurt lid and the bagel tag (the tag itself was attached to a plastic bag with bagels in it); the national green-yellow color scheme appears on the back of the juice bottle; and the back of the cornflakes box and the tea mug are overloaded with national icons such as the Sydney Harbor Bridge, the Great Barrier Reef or Ned Kelly. For those who still don’t get it, the words “Australian” or “Aussie” are displayed prominently on each product.

But get what? Ostensibly, this display of national imagery provides information about where the products were made. However, according to the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, around 90% of food consumed in Australia is produced nationally. So, in Australia, the fact that the food on your breakfast table is Australian isn’t really all that newsworthy. In fact, the message that this nationalistic food packaging delivers is a different one. On one level, it is an advertising message: these products are marked as good and desirable because they are associated with the positive imagery of Australian-ness. On another level, however, they trivialize the very national symbols they use to “uplift” their products. And, they remind us, each morning at the breakfast table of our national belonging.

Michael Billig coined the term “banal nationalism” for the way in which mundane, everyday signage such as the labeling on these breakfast foods reminds us of our national identities on a daily basis. “Banal nationalism” refers to “the ideological habits which enable the established nations of the West to be reproduced” (Billig, 1995, p. 6). Many people think of nationalism as extremism and as extreme forms of national ardor such as those of Nazi Germany or the disintegrating Yugoslavia. However, Billig points out that nationalism is the endemic condition of established nation states, that it is enacted and re-enacted daily in many mundane, almost unnoticeable, hence “banal,” ways. It is these banal forms of nationalism that socialize people into seeing themselves as members of a particular nation who live in a wider world of nation states.

Have you had your daily dose of banal nationalism today?

Much of the signage that can be found in contemporary public spaces is commercial. It is a form of advertising, and language choice in commercial signage such as shop names is a good indicator of the values associated with a particular language. The basic idea is that the connotations of the shop name are such that they will attract potential customers. From a multilingual perspective, the interesting signs are those where a language other than the default choice – the official language of a particular place – is used. In much of the non-English-speaking world, English signs, of course, hold pride of place and English has come to be widely associated with modernity, progress, globalization and consumption. Whereas languages other than English mostly index ethnic stereotypes, English indexes a social stereotype (as I discussed in detail in this review article). What that means is that English is not used to conjure up some archetypal American or British quality in the same way that French or Italian are used to imbue a business with some stereotypical French-ness or Italian-ness.

The association of English with consumerism is perfectly encapsulated in this shop sign at Munich airport. Munich is the capital of Bavaria, one of the states in Germany’s federal structure. The German word for “Bavaria” is “Bayern” and the first syllable of “Bay-ern” is pronounced just like English “buy.” The shop name “Buyern” is thus a neat word play. Bavaria’s national color blue against the background of the national rhombus pattern reinforce the national association. As someone who grew up in Bavaria and had a certain reference for the national symbolism instilled in my childhood, my gut reaction to this sign was one of dismay and offense.

English in this sign clearly bears no relationship whatsoever to any English-speaking country. Rather, it associates English with the national symbolism of a non-English-speaking country, Bavaria, and presents that nation as an object of consumption. The products for sale in this shop are all kinds of souvenirs: Bavarian souvenirs, German souvenirs, European souvenirs, airport souvenirs, Christmas souvenirs (I took the picture in November last year) and other stuff whose only purpose it is to be bought. Buy!

English makes this place – just like pretty much any other airport – a non-space of gratuitous consumption, gratuitous travel, and gratuitous national imagery. English is the language of globalization, that’s for sure; but it’s the globalization of nothing, as George Ritzer tells us. Does that make English the language of nothing? Non-people in non-places buying non-things in non-service encounters and using a non-language?!

Piller, I. (2003). ADVERTISING AS A SITE OF LANGUAGE CONTACT Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 23 DOI: 10.1017/S0267190503000254

Ritzer, G. (2007). The globalization of nothing 2 Thousand Oaks, CA, & London: Sage

London Dairy ad on a building in Abu Dhabi, UAE

Igloo ad on truck in Abu Dhabi, UAE

I’ve just come across a 2006 University of South Africa MA thesis investigating Saudi fast-food ads. The author, Basem Abbas Al Agha, finds that

[…] 97% of the respondents believed that the translations are incomprehensible in Arabic. The other 3% stated that they sometimes understand the translations. (p. 92)

Even if the sample size is rather small, these are astounding results: basically, he’s saying that the entire target population of an advertising message doesn’t get it. Small wonder that Arabic speakers often gripe about the way the Arabic language has become “infested” (Al Agha’s term; p. 82) with English. Al Agha notes that the preferred “translation” strategy in his corpus of Saudi fast-food ads is transliteration rather than translation. Transliteration is also very much in evidence elsewhere in the Arab World. Consider the following four examples. I took the first two pictures in Abu Dhabi, the third one was taken in Cairo and published by Gulf News, and I took the fourth one – surprise, surprise – in Munich.

What these signs have in common is the fact that they look bilingual but are really monolingual in two different scripts. “London Dairy” is “London Dairy” in the Roman and the Arabic script; “Igloo” is “Igloo” in the Roman and Arabic script; “Smart” is “Smart” in the Roman and Arabic script; and “McDonalds” is “McDonalds” in the Roman and Arabic script. The McDonalds sign may look monolingual but that is just because neither the Roman nor the Cyrillic versions that also grace the McDonalds outlet at Munich’s central Marienplatz fit in the picture.

Clothing store in Cairo, Egypt; source: http://gulfnews.com/news/region/egypt/minding-one-s-language-in-egypt-1.58617

McDonald’s outlet in Munich, Germany

Some of these transliterations fit the patterns of the Arabic language more comfortably than others but all of them can be considered loan-words and insert a foreign or exotic element into the Arabic language. Unsurprisingly, some Arabic speakers find them annoying. Al Agha claims that this type of advertising is outright “rejected by the target culture” (p. vi). I don’t know about that seeing how prevalent the practice is and how well fast-food restaurants in particular seem to be doing in the region.

Of course, the transfer of brand names from one language market to another is inherently a tricky business as the imperative to keep the brand constant in order to achieve brand recognition is in conflict with the imperative to be responsive to the specificity of the target market. Many people have heard of and had a good laugh at some of the more spectacular misnomers such as the one by Mitsubishi, who didn’t bother to check the meaning of Pajero before they introduced the car of this name to Latin America (it’s the equivalent of a four-letter word in some countries in the region) or Ford, who made the same mistake, when they introduced their Nova to Spanish-speaking markets (“no va” = “doesn’t move”). I’ve got a chapter on interlingual brand name bloopers in my PhD thesis, which is available from our Resources Section. However, infelicities such as these are really those of an older, less sophisticated era of advertising – certainly before the advent of diversity marketing. The “multi-scripted” (is that the term for the phenomenon?) rendition of the “McDonald’s” name in Munich is the most obvious example of the strategy I have collected to date: an obvious attempt to signal diversity symbolically by one of the most homogeneous corporations in the world.

Unlike large US brands such as McDonald’s who may seek to symbolically distance themselves from all forms of hegemony, including linguistic hegemony, in order to be able to do “hegemonic business,” small local shops such as the “Smart” tailor in Cairo still bank on the cache of English in order to attract customers.

 

Frontpage of the IT section of the Jam-e Jam newspaper, Iran

One of the reasons I mostly dislike transliterated brand-names is that they are so obviously fake. Scratch the surface of these “multilingual” signs a tiny bit and all that is beneath it is English monolingualism. However, I also have (one!) example of a very sophisticated multi-scripted brand name in my corpus! This one comes not from the Arab world but from Iran: the name of the IT section of the Iranian newspaper Jam-e Jam is “click.” “Click” is much more than a simple transliteration as the word can be read both ways: read from right-to-left, you get “click” in the Arabic script; read from left-to-right, you get “click” in the Roman script. Multilingual creativity at its best!

Anyone got examples of transliterated brand names and advertising? I’m always on the look-out to increase my collection

Reference

Al Agha, Basem Abbas (2006). The translation of fast-food advertising texts from English into Arabic Unpublished MA dissertation, University of South Africa

If we accept that consumption has become the key driver of our age, it doesn’t come as a surprise either that consumption is inspiring art in the way that death and religion used to inspire art. The art inspired by consumption is, of course, called advertising. Multilingual advertising is a fascinating site for research into language ideologies and the ways in which languages and their speakers are (de)valued in one of the most hegemonic discourses that is around. I did a couple of studies of the use of languages other than German in German advertising in the late 1990s, all of which are available from our Resources Section. They are all a bit dated by now but an overview of language contact in international advertising which sketches future research directions for the field and which I did for the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics in 2003 (and which is also there) isn’t.

In that paper I was suggesting that a sociolinguistics of advertising needed to move beyond mere descriptivism in order to make a meaningful contribution to the social sciences. In particular, I was calling for investigations of the role of multilingual advertising in making corporatism appear benign, and obscure the neo-colonial and exploitative social structures that ultimately make the kind of hyper-consumption we are witnessing today possible. To quote myself:

At a time when the values, tastes, and industrial practices of American brands are being exported to every corner of the globe, there is a simultaneous attempt to distance these brands – symbolically—from America. One way of doing so may be to use languages other than English in their advertising. The indexing of heterogeneity through the use of multilingual advertising, particularly by U.S. brands, at a time when these very brands rely upon homogeneous consumption practices for their profits, looks set to be another intriguing area of research for linguists working with language contact phenomena in advertising (2003, p. 177)

So far, no one seems to have taken the bait. The challenge still stands, though, as does Naomi Klein’s analysis of diversity marketing on which I was drawing:

Today the buzzword in global marketing isn’t selling America to the world, but bringing a kind of market masala to everyone in the world. In the late nineties, the pitch is less Marlboro Man, more Ricky Martin: a bilingual mix of North and South, some Latin, some R&B, all couched in global party lyrics. This ethnic-food-court approach creates a One World placelessness, a global mall in which corporations are able to sell a single product in numerous countries without triggering the cries of “Coca-Colonization.” (No Logo, 2001, p. 131f.)

Reference
Piller, I. (2003). ADVERTISING AS A SITE OF LANGUAGE CONTACT Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 23 DOI: 10.1017/S0267190503000254

One dad in our trick-or-treating party figured Prestÿ was German: “Don’t you guys put umlauts on everything?” “No.” I figured it was Turkish but am told that a y with umlaut does not exist in Turkish, either. At least, Turkish is an educated guess seeing that the wrapper also has “Sütlü Çikolata” written on it. “Sütlü Çikolata” is Turkish for “Milk Chocolate” – the other bit of language on the wrapper I recognize.

Further clues: The candy was found in a trick-or-treat bag in Abu Dhabi and so can be presumed to have been purchased in the UAE although there is no Arabic writing on the wrapper. There is no country-of-origin information on the wrapper, either, although there is some illegible small print under something that looks like “asas” and which might conceivably contain statutory information if it were not too small to be legible. Googling “Elvan chocolates” produces a further Turkish connection: Elvan is the name of an Istanbul-based company producing chocolates and pastries for “more than 70 countries over 6 continents.”

Of course, it doesn’t really matter whether Prestÿ “exists” in any real language – as long as people associate it with a particular language and transfer the associations they have with that language onto the product, Prestÿ is doing its job. Along the lines “I suppose Prestÿ is German for ‘prestige’ so the qualities of German must apply to the chocolate, too.” Mostly, German is associated with cars and technology, though, where it tends to be used to connote high quality. I know because I’ve written a few research papers on the iconic use of foreign languages in advertising and if you want to follow up on multilingualism in advertising, you can find some of my research papers in our resources section.

More likely, Prestÿ is just supposed to be “general European” and supposed to connote the sophistication of European chocolate and cuisine. There’s a lot of multilingual meaning-making on this humble little piece of junk and I would love to hear your interpretations!