CROSS-CULTURAL ADAPTATION OF ADVERTISING MEDIA TEXT IN THE MEDIA COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM OF SOUTH ASIAN COUNTRIES

Hassan Dewan Mehedi

The media communications of South Asian countries form a multilingual and multi-confessional environment: the advertising media text operates there across several languages, scripts and value registers at once. The subject of the study is the mechanisms of cross-cultural adaptation of such a text as it is transferred into the media space of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. The global advertising template diverges from the local communicative expectations of the audience. Hence the question: which textual levels are reconfigured during adaptation, and which of them carries the main load. The answer rests on a four-level author's model covering the linguistic, visual-semiotic, value-pragmatic and genre-platform levels; the model is tested on an author's corpus of advertising media texts from the regional media market for 2023–2026. The reconfiguration is shown to run not through surface translation but through the value-pragmatic level: adaptation draws on the calendar of religious festivals, family and status frames, and the system of politeness address. The linguistic level gravitates steadily towards mixed code and register switching, whereas the visual layer preserves the recognisability of the global brand. The resulting typology describes cross-cultural adaptation of the advertising media text in the region as a recoding of value orientations under a recognisable global shell, which refines the boundary between translation and transcreation in media linguistics.

Keywords:advertising media text, cross-cultural adaptation, media communications, South Asian countries, polycode text, transcreation, cultural code, code-switching.