Since the reform and opening up, the advertising industry in China has developed very rapidly, with rapid growth for 20 consecutive years. The advertising market has maintained a double-digit annual growth rate for many years, which has been recognized as the highest in the world. In 2003, the advertising market turnover exceeded 654.38+000 billion yuan for the first time, reaching 654.38+007.868 billion yuan, accounting for 0.92% of the gross national product, ranking fourth in the world. Advertising plays an increasingly important role in China's economic construction and social life, and plays a very positive role in marketing promotion, brand building, consumption guidance and export expansion. The advertising products of various media are rich and colorful, and the production level and artistic level have also been greatly improved. It has become a matter of widespread influence in social life and a public concern. China's advertisements are constantly innovating in the application of language and characters, which is an active field of language innovation. Many well-known advertising slogans appeared, some of which even became popular words in the same period, which played a positive role in enriching the expression and application of China language. However, with the rapid development of the advertising industry, there are also some problems in the use of language and characters, which obviously violates the relevant provisions of the National Law on Common Languages and Characters.
Paragraph 2 of Article 14 of China's Law on the National Common Language stipulates that the words used in signboards and advertisements should be based on the national common language. The State Administration for Industry and Commerce issued the Interim Provisions on the Administration of Advertising Language and Characters on June 1998+ 10/5, 2005, which came into effect on March 1 that year, which is the direct basis for standardizing and managing the use of advertising language and characters at present. The Interim Provisions on the Administration of Advertising Language and Characters and other national laws and departmental regulations have also made relevant provisions on the use of advertising language. Including: Advertising Law and Regulations on Advertising Management (1adopted at the 10th meeting of the Eighth NPC Standing Committee on October 27th, 1994), Interim Measures for the Administration of Radio and Television Advertisements (promulgated by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television on August 28, 2003), and Notice on Several Provisions on the Correct Use of Chinese Characters and Pinyin in Signboards, Commodity Packaging and Advertisements of Enterprises and Stores (promulgated by the State Language Commission, the Ministry of Commerce, the Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations and Trade, and the State Administration for Industry and Commerce on April 1987)
According to these laws and regulations, local governments have also formulated some corresponding local regulations. The provisions of this Ordinance on the use of advertising language are mainly in the following aspects:
Advertising language should use Putonghua and standardized Chinese characters.
The language used in advertisements should meet the requirements of socialist spiritual civilization construction and must not contain bad cultural content.
The language used in advertisements should be clear and accurate, and the words used should be standardized, including the use of typos, the use of traditional Chinese characters that violate national laws and regulations, the use of variant characters and simplified characters that have been abolished by the state, the use of printed glyphs that have been abolished by the state, and the intentional use of typos. Creativity needs to use handwritten characters, artistic characters, variant characters and ancient Chinese characters in advertisements, which should be easy to identify without problems.
Hanyu Pinyin may not be used alone in advertisements. If hanyu pinyin needs to be used in advertisements, it should be correctly standardized and used simultaneously with standardized Chinese characters. Foreign languages and characters shall not be used alone in advertisements. If foreign languages and characters are used in advertisements due to special needs, Putonghua and standardized Chinese characters shall be the main forms, supplemented by foreign languages and characters, and foreign languages and characters shall not be mixed in the same advertisement statement. If the meaning expressed in a foreign language in an advertisement is inconsistent with the Chinese meaning, the Chinese meaning shall prevail.
The use of idioms in advertisements must comply with the relevant provisions of the state, and must not mislead and adversely affect the society, and must not intentionally change homophonic idioms. Don't use terms such as national, superlative and best. Leaders' famous sayings shall not be used or tampered with as commercial advertising language.
The supervision and management of the use of advertising language and characters shall be implemented by local industrial and commercial administrative organs, and the maximum fine for violating the regulations on advertising management shall be 30 thousand yuan. However, in the actual advertising products, there are still various language uses that violate the relevant regulations.
Problems and disputes in the use of advertising language and characters
Abuse of foreign languages
Nowadays, a large number of foreign languages appear in advertisements of various media, and many of them are used in violation of relevant regulations. Some advertisements use foreign languages as the advertising language completely, such as the famous Nike sports shoes advertisement, and the advertising language is enough; ; In 2005, the advertisements of Nissan, which were often broadcast by CCTV, ended with only one English dubbing explanation: Nissan, shift gears in the future. It is common for advertisements to be mixed with foreign languages. Many foreign languages mixed in advertisements are not translated and explained, and many English advertising languages occupy the main part of advertisements. In online advertisements, foreign languages are used more frequently, and some job advertisements are written entirely in foreign languages. Internet advertising is a new advertising media, and its management is still relatively weak.
Improper use of foreign languages in advertising language is an obvious violation of national laws and regulations on language management and advertising management, but this phenomenon is not as attractive as other advertising language issues, and the focus of public controversy is rarely concentrated in this regard.
Abuse homophones and tamper with idioms
A typical advertising case in this kind of phenomenon is "no hemorrhoids" and "cough can't be delayed". In fact, the two ways are related, and tampering with idioms is mainly a way to replace homophones. This is the most concerned and controversial phenomenon in the use of advertising language. It has been stipulated in relevant laws and regulations, and the administrative departments for industry and commerce often deal with it illegally in law enforcement. However, this method is very popular in China's advertisements, and it appears constantly, such as "buying a car as a gift in the New Year with a lot of oil", "showing off the cool front", "lascivious smearing", "no fear of hemorrhoids", "no cure for stomach", "no joy for silent mosquitoes" and "endless riding". The public who are critical of this phenomenon believe that this is undermining language norms and misleading consumers, and primary and secondary school students are the most affected groups, which will lead to wrong information. Some surveys show that these advertisements do have a negative impact on the idiom cognition of primary and secondary school students. Shaanxi Huashang Daily conducted an online survey on June 5438+ 10, 2004. Among the interviewees, 43% think homophones are misleading and have a bad influence, which should be resolutely banned. It is considered that this is a way for the store to increase its popularity and attract customers, and there is no need to make a fuss, accounting for 39%; There are also 19% people who think it is normal. Some people think that if there is something wrong with the advertising language, it can only come from the content, or it is false, or unhealthy, or it violates relevant regulations. Language skills, including homophonic, serve the content. Only when there is something wrong with the content can skills help, and if there is nothing wrong with the content, language skills will add luster to the advertising language. Therefore, the use of rhetoric devices such as homophony in advertising language should not be banned. The right and wrong of using homophones as advertising language is quite complicated. There is no sufficient basis and persuasiveness for complete prohibition, and laissez-faire will indeed cause some adverse social impacts. In this regard, the author believes that experts should be organized to carry out some empirical research, conduct in-depth investigation and analysis of various specific cases and their impact on the public and attitudes, in order to find some standards to measure, so as to basically clarify what is prohibited and what is allowed.
Abuse puns
Pun is another common phenomenon in advertising language, which can get good results if used well. For example, the famous advertising slogan "Be a good woman" in the late 1990s was once considered as a very good advertising slogan. However, many advertisements have caused controversy, mainly because some pun advertisements give people associations that violate public morality and values, such as "Do you have a second house", which means "You have a second house", but the original intention of "second house" belongs to social ugliness and is easy to arouse disgust. Similarly, some people imitated "it's good to be a woman" and made an advertisement "it's good to be a man", which was stopped by the industrial and commercial department because of obvious sexual hints. This phenomenon is often difficult to judge right or wrong, but the feelings of the public can also be used as a reference for judgment.
There are all kinds of language diseases.
Many advertisements are obviously inappropriate and full of mistakes in word selection, collocation and grammar. In addition to some deliberate unconventional use to achieve special expression effects, many of them are caused by lack of language knowledge and carelessness. The concrete manifestations are word errors, word formation, grammatical errors and so on. These problems are easily ignored by the public, and the industrial and commercial departments pay less attention to these problems when checking advertisements, but this is obviously an irregular language and should be paid enough attention.
Text error
Improper use of words in advertising language is also a common phenomenon, which is mainly caused by carelessness and insufficient language cultivation. A postal department in Hubei once printed postal advertisements on postal express receipts, and there were two mistakes: the word "which" in "Where is the deposit?" was printed as "Na" and the word "Zhou" in "Global Information Express Across Five Continents" was printed as "State". There are obvious mistakes in such a small advertisement with only two lines, which shows that advertisers and producers are extremely negligent in censorship.
Ambiguous expression
In other words, advertising is ambiguous or ambiguous in language expression. For example, the job advertisement of a company in Shanghai says "those with credit card experience are preferred", which can be understood as those with credit card consumption experience are preferred, but its original intention refers to those with credit card development experience. For another example, the title of an advertisement is "A mobile phone broke the news again", which can be understood as "News generated by the explosion of the mobile phone itself" or "A mobile phone broke the amazing news".
Use words that mean "best and highest"
This is a violation of advertising management laws and regulations. In the second quarter of 2004, the Advertising Section of Haidian Industrial and Commercial Branch and various industrial and commercial offices monitored 90,934 advertisements in various newspapers and media, and 45 were suspected of illegal advertisements. Among the advertisements suspected of violating the law, most of them use absolute terms such as "top", "best" and "national", accounting for 45% of illegal advertisements. Because there are many such words, advertisers keep innovating and try to use all kinds of words with the meaning of "best and highest", such as "best", "first brand", "best in the world" and "best in technology". The State Administration for Industry and Commerce has also specially issued the Measures. In this regard, as long as the regulatory authorities are in place, it should be able to prevent the problem from continuing.
Strengthen the review of the use of advertising language.
There are still some problems in the use of advertising language, such as improper use of dialects, improper use of punctuation marks and low style, which are not listed here. Generally speaking, there are many nonstandard phenomena in the use of advertising language, the source of which is very clear, that is, the advertising design and production units, and the advertisers behind them certainly have a role, but the advertising slogans are mainly created by the advertising design and production units. According to the regulations of the administrative department for industry and commerce, an advertising company must have more than two advertising examiners when registering. Advertising examiners should first pay attention to the standardization and proper use of advertising language. However, the advertising company itself first pays attention to the needs of customers and whether the advertisement can catch the eye. When creating advertisements, it is easy to ignore the standardization and proper use of advertising language. However, the language literacy of advertising examiners is still obviously insufficient, and advertising design can't be done well. The advertising agency of the media advertising department and the advertising examiner also have the same problem, so that the problem advertisements are constantly met with the public.
It is an effective way to solve the above problems and manage the advertisement examiners. On the one hand, we should strengthen the supervision of advertising examiners, and don't let them just become decorations; On the other hand, they should also be given language training to improve their language literacy. Advertising is supervised by the administrative department for industry and commerce, but the administrative department of language and writing has more say in the problems of language and writing itself, but the working committees of language and writing at all levels are not law enforcement departments. The administrative department for industry and commerce should strengthen cooperation with the administrative department for writing and do a good job in this respect.
References:
1. Department of Language Application Management, Ministry of Education, Education Committee of the National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China. Language publishing house, 200 1.
2. Zhang Bin, Yu Yi. Wash the face of the city. Shanghai Culture Publishing House, 2004
3. Beijing: Stop using homophones in advertising language. People's Daily, June 2003-1 1