TY - JOUR
T1 - Linguistic Variations Between Translated and Non-Translated English Chairman’s Statements in Corporate Annual Reports
T2 - A Multidimensional Analysis
AU - Wang, Zhongliang
AU - Liu, Kanglong
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2024.
PY - 2024/5/15
Y1 - 2024/5/15
N2 - As an important component of a company’s annual report, the chairman’s statement offers an important channel for the chairman of the company to report on the company’s performance in unquantified and textual terms. The Chairman’s statement serves as background for the shareholders, investors and wider stakeholders to have an overview of a company’s performance and activities over the course of one year. In this study, three corpora were compiled from the annual reports of listed companies based in Mainland China, Hong Kong and the United States. A corpus-based multi-dimensional analysis was conducted to investigate the linguistic characteristics between translated and non-translated English chairman’s statements. The findings indicate that the translated chairman’s statements of Mainland Chinese companies are informationally denser and more context-independent than the non-translated ones of American and Hong Kong companies. The results of a fine-grained analysis show that the translated and non-translated chairman’s statements have significant differences regards various linguistic features, indicating that cultural differences and translation might constitute important factors in affecting the textual profiling. Our study has yielded some new evidence towards a more comprehensive understanding of the linguistic differences between translated and non-translated chairman’s statements, and enriching the existing knowledge of translational language. This study also offers some practical as well as pedagogical insights into communication issues in business English and business translation.
AB - As an important component of a company’s annual report, the chairman’s statement offers an important channel for the chairman of the company to report on the company’s performance in unquantified and textual terms. The Chairman’s statement serves as background for the shareholders, investors and wider stakeholders to have an overview of a company’s performance and activities over the course of one year. In this study, three corpora were compiled from the annual reports of listed companies based in Mainland China, Hong Kong and the United States. A corpus-based multi-dimensional analysis was conducted to investigate the linguistic characteristics between translated and non-translated English chairman’s statements. The findings indicate that the translated chairman’s statements of Mainland Chinese companies are informationally denser and more context-independent than the non-translated ones of American and Hong Kong companies. The results of a fine-grained analysis show that the translated and non-translated chairman’s statements have significant differences regards various linguistic features, indicating that cultural differences and translation might constitute important factors in affecting the textual profiling. Our study has yielded some new evidence towards a more comprehensive understanding of the linguistic differences between translated and non-translated chairman’s statements, and enriching the existing knowledge of translational language. This study also offers some practical as well as pedagogical insights into communication issues in business English and business translation.
KW - business translation
KW - Chairman’s statement
KW - corpus-based
KW - linguistic features
KW - multi-dimensional analysis
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85193688989&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/21582440241249349
DO - 10.1177/21582440241249349
M3 - Journal article
AN - SCOPUS:85193688989
SN - 2158-2440
VL - 14
JO - SAGE Open
JF - SAGE Open
IS - 2
ER -