| Comment | It seems there are different levels of English influence on German. The first one is the most acceptable to most people, when a foreign concept is adopted in Germany and there is no word for it in German. Walkman, Discman, surfing, world wide web etc would be some examples. The second category is the "shortsleeved T-shirt category", where products are produced monolingually in China or wherever and are sold all over the world, without any effort to translate the text. You can include stereo equipment, tvs, and even cars in this with their "open/close", "up.down" and "ejects" and "repeats" - how often do you see these things in German now? I think this is understandable to an extent, but ultimately the most important rule in marketing should be to speak the customer's language, and I think increasingly this is not the case. The third and most needless use of English in German speaking countries is the voluntary use of Denglisch in advertising. Sometimes it is clever, but often it is just confusing. I mean, what does "Colour your life" actually mean? Why does that slogan need to be in English? The target market is the 80 million people who live in Germany, virtually all of whom speak German. It's the same in shopping centres, even in smaller East German towns I have seen "Sale", "new arrivals","gift card" and more ludicrous things like "closing down"! WHy on earth do German customers need to be told that a shop is closing down in a foreign language. It is this element of (De)nglish which is confusing and pointless, and has nothing to do with golabalisation, Weltoffenheit, or multi-lingualism. |
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