Irish English in intra- and intercultural advertising

Product descriptions are a type of banal, backstage advertising, but they are also a means of giving consumers additional information about commodities, which in the current consumer culture may be as valuable for identity work and value creation as the commodities themselves. Intercultural advertising may be facilitated or hampered by the discourses and strategies adopted in order to explain the products to consumers outside of the cultural context. Where the product itself is commodified language, the description takes place through language and is also about language. The analysis of product descriptions for t-shirts which feature a type of Irish English, described as ‘culchie style’ reveals different metapragmatic strategies (standardised translation, metapragmatic discussion, synthetic interaction, metacultural narratives and global juxtaposition) along a continuum from explicit to implicit. It is argued that the former facilitate intercultural marketing and wider circulation more easily than the latter.