English versions of corporate websites. A linguacultural contrastive study of Germany and Spain

If local companies in Europe target international visitors as well as national ones, they generally set up an English version of their corporate websites alongside the version in their native language. In their attempt to portray themselves in ways that are engaging to visitors, companies address topics such as corporate history, values and practices on their websites. However, the relevance given to the various topics and the style used may vary across cultures. The present study aims, first, to unveil whether discursive differences exist in website versions in English which were set up by European local companies. Second, it is investigated whether the differences may be explained with reference to Hofstede's model. Because of its importance in Europe, the companies belong to the dairy sector. The countries chosen for the present investigation are Germany and Spain, the cultural differences of which, with reference to Hofstede's model (Hofstede et al. 2010), are less marked when contrasted with the countries in previous linguistic studies on corporate websites (Cucchi 2010a, 2012, 2015, 2016). Methodologically, the study, based on a corpus of self-representative discourse from the websites of 12 German and 12 Spanish companies, draws on the Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies tradition (Partington 2004; Baker 2006), so as to verify the extent to which the findings are compatible with those obtained, within linguistics, from other countries and/or other genres, and with those in other disciplinary domains. The study relies on Wmatrix (Rayson 2009) for content analysis and on WordSmith Tools (Scott 2012) for the analysis of dispersion plots. Results show that German websites are more informal and give more prominence to data, while Spanish websites rely more on 'self-celebratory' discourse, emphasising tradition, quality and awards. Overall, the findings show that Hofstede's model is helpful for the study of the English versions of websites of European local companies, even in countries where cultural differences are less marked. Since cross-cultural differences still exist among the websites of European companies, future research should address the issue of what content and style are appropriate when targeting international customers in English used as a lingua franca.

欧洲本土企业若同时面向国际访客与本国用户，通常会在其母语版本的企业网站之外，增设一个英文版本。为了以吸引访客的方式展现自身形象，企业会在网站上介绍公司历史、价值观及经营实践等主题。然而，不同文化背景下，各主题的重要性排序及所用风格可能存在差异。本研究首先旨在揭示欧洲本土企业所设英文网站版本中是否存在话语差异。其次，研究将探讨这些差异是否可通过霍夫斯泰德模型（Hofstede's model）得到解释。鉴于乳制品行业在欧洲的重要性，本研究选取的企业均来自该领域。本研究选定德国与西班牙为研究对象，相较于此前企业网站语言学研究中涉及的国家（Cucchi 2010a、2012、2015、2016），这两个国家基于霍夫斯泰德模型（Hofstede et al. 2010）的文化差异程度相对较低。方法学层面，本研究基于12家德国企业与12家西班牙企业网站的自我呈现话语语料库，借鉴语料库辅助话语研究传统（Partington 2004；Baker 2006），旨在验证研究结果与语言学领域内其他国家及/或其他体裁的研究发现的契合程度。研究结果显示，德国企业网站风格更为非正式，且更注重数据呈现；而西班牙企业网站则更多采用“自我颂扬”式话语，强调传统、品质与奖项。总体而言，研究结果表明，霍夫斯泰德模型对于欧洲本土企业英文网站版本的研究具有参考价值，即便在文化差异程度较低的国家亦是如此。鉴于欧洲企业网站间仍存在跨文化差异，未来研究应探讨在将英语作为通用语面向国际客户时，何种内容与风格更为适宜这一问题。