“We want you to love our product” — An English-German Translation Analysis of Consumer Oriented Language on Drink Packaging Texts

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore on a cross-cultural level the different use of consumer oriented language on English and German drink packaging texts. To this end, we propose to compare the original English texts of a popular fruit drink (‘innocent’ smoothies) both with their German translations of the same product that has recently been introduced on the German market and other German original texts of a similar product. The intention is to explore how the consumer oriented language of the original English texts impacts on or is adapted for the German texts. Consumer orientation with respect to drink packaging texts is here understood as language use that does not primarily aim at informing about the respective product, but at creating a bond between consumer and brand, e.g. by use of humour and direct addresses. The methodological framework is provided by the functional pragmatic concept of homileic discourse (Rehbein 1983) and (1997) concept of the Cultural Filter. The latter is a concept based on cross-cultural differences in English and German text conventions; our focus will be on the dimension of Implicitness vs. Explicitness.