Translanguaging in the advertising campaign “Don’t be loro”: a semiolinguistic analysis

Abstract

In this article, we analyse the 2017 advertising campaign “Don’t be loro” by the company CNA Idiomas, in which translanguaging was explicitly featured in the lexical choice for the slogan. Through the perspective of semiolinguistics, as proposed by Patrick Charaudeau, three scenes present in the advertising videos, available on the YouTube channel, and a poster, published on the brand’s Facebook page, containing the graphic art and the slogan of the campaign, were analysed. The analysis revealed a constant critique of audiolingual models of teaching, which use repetition exercises as the primary form of pedagogical procedures, suggesting that students trained in this methodology are unprepared for real situations of communication. Additionally, the campaign emplyed multimodal and multisemiotic resources to meaning production, assisting those unfamiliar with the language in the comprehension of the message conveyed in English. Lastly, through the discursive dynamics of the slogan, the company positions itself in a superior knowledge order in relation to its interlocutor, the customer, offering its educational services in a way that does not render them unable to use the language independently. Through this, the company establishes itself as superior to brands still relying on ineffective methodologies make English learning dull and insignificant.