Manipulation of society through advertising. Language manipulation mechanisms in advertisements

Book excerpt: Diploma Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject Communications - Public Relations, Advertising, Marketing, Social Media, grade: -, , language: English, abstract: The diploma paper is a research of the written advertising from the linguistic and translation perspective. The aim of this paper is to point out the language manipulation mechanisms and the strategies of advertising translation. The Paper has the following structure: the annotations in the English and Romanian languages, the introduction, two chapters: a theoretical and a practical one, each one containing a conclusion, the general conclusions, the bibliography made up from 12 consulted books, 4 articles and 8 internet resources, consulted sites and the appendix. The paper presents the concept of manipulation through advertising, and namely the language manipulation mechanisms in advertisements, which are being presented by lexical features, which include weasel words and emotionally coloured words, by grammatical and syntactic features, which mostly relate to the way text is constructed and the intentional mistakes committed in advertising texts. We will see what the words that are frequently used in advertising are. The third aspect that represents language manipulation mechanisms is stylistic dimensions, which implies such stylistic devices as personification, metaphors, metonymy, synecdoche, puns, imperatives. We will find out to which stylistic devices, advertisers love to resort. Aside from this, we will discuss about translation strategies in advertising, which can be summarized to three main strategies: literal translation, free translation and idiomatic translations. We will also notice that the translation of advertising depends not only on cultural aspects. Many of authors that wrote about translation of advertising have different opinions upon how this topic should be approached. Based on the practical chapter we will try to find out what is more relevant and what wins over: to transmit the message accurately, or to create the effect. Based on things mentioned above, we will analyse what aspects of advertising attract people, creating the positive effect and what turn them away. All in all this diploma paper shows what vocabulary is used in advertising, what speech and how language is used in vocabulary. From the point of view of translation of advertising we will see whatever the foreign advertising prefer to translate the slogans word by word, or they prefer to make their own one, keeping only the general idea.