Name: Nguyễn Thị Diệu Hường

Class: 19E11

HOMEWORK WEEK 5
Hello, my name is Peter Midgely. I’m a staff interpreter with the European
commission and I’ve been asked to read a couple of speeches to you of the type which
I would generally give to student interpreters in the early stages of their training. This
first speech is about advertising and I'm gonna illustrate my argument with reference
to the advertising of the sleeping pill.
We live in a world which is today a wash with information, no generation prior to ours
has had access to so much information. But we're still not able to easily arrive at
decisions and particularly when the information which we are being given is
deliberately misleading. And my argument is that in the case of advertising. All the
information is deliberately misleading. We would perhaps not take an interest in a
product if we were to be given a purely rational and factual argument. And therefore
the advertisers spend a great deal of money and use a great many resources to develop
arguments which play upon our instincts and emotions. I'd like to illustrate this by
reference to the tactics deployed by a French pharmaceutical company when it tried to
introduce one of its products to the Japanese market.
Product in question had been on sale for quite some time in Europe but of course
when you're working in a new and foreign market, it is necessary to research local
attitudes and culture. The French company discovered on doing so that the Japanese
attitude to sleep was quite different from that which you would commonly find in
europe. Europe's sleep is regarded as well-deserved rest after a period of work or
exertion. In Japan um sleep is regarded as a rather unfortunate biological necessity. In
a society where being in a group is extremely important. Sleep is also regarded as a
period of time in which one is isolated from the group and is therefore sometimes
accompanied by rather negative feelings or indeed feelings of guilt. Consequently, the
Japanese didn't like to discuss their sleeping problems with doctors and doctors are not
keen to prescribe sleeping pills.
As constant activity is deemed to be the ideal situation, most Japanese will refuse to
take a product which might reduce their alertness at work. And therefore the french
company decided that it would present its uh sleeping pill as a tonic. As a way of
waking up refreshed in the morning after a good night's sleep ready for a new day of
activity. And this is reflected by the packaging of the product which shows a young
lady in an aerobics suit looking very dynamic and full of energy, the sort of design
that in Europe you would probably find on a dietary supplements package or package
of vitamins. So with a wave of magic wand the marketing men have transformed this
product into its opposite or to be more exact they wish us to suspend our critical
judgment and believe that it is the opposite of what it really is. So we're given vast
amounts of information but we do have to take a very critical look at it.