What’s your favorite flavor? Starbucks: A Contrastive Analysis
Got Coffee? What’s your favorite flavor? Coffee, nowadays an everyday necessity for a great number of people all over the world. Starbucks – as a global enterprise – is famous for bringing you the most delicious and varied coffee flavors in the world, but how does this multinational address her customers throughout her online advertisements? This research discusses how cultural conventions influence the language usage on the American and Dutch Starbucks websites. By means of contrastive analysis, a comparison was drawn between several texts originating from the American Starbucks website, and the Dutch Starbucks website, applying two of Julianne House’s dimensions, namely explicitness/implicitness, and orientation towards the self/other. Generally, Starbucks does not adapt her international websites to the cultural filters of the targeted language, but uses overt translation, a concept in which the American source texts are literally translated. Our research indicates that, although overt translation is applied within the translation of the Dutch Starbucks website, the texts on the Dutch Starbucks website contain more indicators of explicitness and focus more on orientation towards the other, in contrast to the American source texts, which are marked by implicitness and orientation towards the self.
