Appreciation and Comprehension of English in Dutch Advertising

Abstract

English is increasingly used in Dutch advertising. Previous studies already revealed that the appreciation of these advertisements and commercials is dependent on the comprehension of them (Gerritsen et al. 2000; Hornikx, Van Meurs, and De Boer, 2010). However, these studies only took into account the comprehension of the commercials themselves. The present study set out to explore whether appreciation of English in Dutch advertisements is correlated with general English translation skills. Subjects from two different age groups (20-25 and 70+) filled in a questionnaire and completed various English proficiency tasks. Whereas previous studies measured comprehension of English by asking subjects to translate the commercials/advertisements, this study uses a general English translation task, a self-assessment task, and the advertisement translation task to measure English proficiency. Results show that the young group understands the English language significantly better than the older group. This effect was visible in all three translation tasks. Since all three tasks reveal similar scores, general English proficiency appears not only to be effectively measured with a general English translation task, but with all three tasks independently. Surprisingly, no differences in appreciation were found between the age groups in their assessment of the attractiveness, persuasiveness, and reliability of the advertisements. This study therefore suggests that the appreciation of English is no longer dependent on its understanding.