Intercultural values in international advertisement communication: a corpus-based qualitative analysis

Abstract

This paper comments on the results of a corpus-based qualitative analysis of the links between the cultural dimen-sions of a linguistic community and its lexical, morphosyntactical and phraseological uses. The analysis follows the principles of the interdisciplinary intercultural model elaborated by Guillén Nieto (2009) and applies them to a first corpus composed of three IKEA catalogues in Spanish, Dutch and English, in order to examine whether the cultural specifics of the linguistic communities they are written for, are taken into account in the translations. A second corpus contains only authentic advertising discourse coming from the same linguistic communities, and is analysed in a similar way. The results show that the model of Guillén Nieto is indeed a useful instrument to com-pose a text that respects the cultural identity of the target audience in its discourse. Nevertheless, the analysis also indicates that the model fails to take into account what de Mooij (1994) calls «the cultural paradox of advertising» nor other variables that may bias its basic principles.