Cultural filters in persuasive texts: a contrastive study of the Dutch and Italian IKEA catalogs

Abstract

Although the photography, design and layout of the Dutch and Italian IKEA catalogs are identical, the content of the texts differs. This may indicate that IKEA deliberately adapts the texts in its catalogs to the countries in which they are published. In this paper we compare the texts in two catalogs (2004 edition) on the basis of a functional-pragmatic approach (Ehlich 1986; Rehbein 2001; Bührig and ten Thije 2005, see chapter 2). Teuns (2004) reports the results of a comparative text analysis in a reader experiment with Dutch and Italian IKEA customers. We expected the test subjects to prefer texts adapted to their own language and culture over texts adapted to another language and culture. The results show that this does not always hold true. Yet this research suggests that it is possible to make well-founded claims based on texts in a multinational company’s catalog about how differences between two cultures are expressed in language and appreciated by those involved.