No abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how corporate values are interpreted by local and international employees in a multilingual organisation that has opted for the local language, not English, as its corporate language. Design/methodology/approach This is a research paper exploring how the recontextualisation and resemiotisation of value terms impact on how corporate values are interpreted, employing triangulation of questionnaire and interview results. Findings When values are recontextualised in employee discourse, proficiency in the corporate language and cultural background was found to have an impact on their interpretation. Internationals were found to have a broader and not exclusively professional interpretation compared to the locals. Internationals with a low level of proficiency in the local language were more sceptical than the locals as to whether there was a shared understanding of the values. Research limitations/implications The questionnaire yielded fewer respondents than the authors expected, which should be taken into account when interpreting the results. Practical implications The paper suggests best practices for communicating corporate values to a multilingual workforce. Social implications This paper contributes to the understanding of linguistic challenges in the multilingual work contexts. Originality/value To the authors’ knowledge, there is little prior in-depth research on how language impacts on employees’ interpretation of corporate values. As values are cohesive devices in organisations, the language used to convey them is worth addressing as the present paper aims to demonstrate.
Organisations recruiting knowledge workers worldwide face a considerable challenge with regard to the choice of corporate language. The use of English as a lingua franca is often perceived as the most obvious option. However, there may be good arguments for using the host country language even in cases where the language in question is relatively small and the English skills of the local population are high. Our paper reports on the results of a study of a Nordic organisation that has chosen the local language as its corporate language. We investigate the implications for the employees' professional and social identity and also discuss the language ideology underlying this choice. The study is based on both interviews and a survey conducted among both local and international members of the organisation 2
A contrastive study of demonstrative clauses in texts translated from French into Norwegian and in Norwegian source texts. Translation strategy or translationese? This study, which is based on a corpus of non fictional texts, aims at describing how the use of demonstrative clauses differs in texts translated from French into Norwegian and Norwegian source texts. The target texts contain 30% more demonstrative clauses than the source texts. The study shows that in many cases demonstrative clauses in the target texts correspond to other types of expressions in the source texts. The target texts add information that is implicit in the source texts and the use of demonstrative clauses can therefore be considered as the result of an explicitation strategy. The study also reveals a stylistical difference in the use of demonstrative clauses in French and Norwegian. These clauses are often used in French to introduce new information about a referent, a discourse strategy which is much more seldom used in Norwegian. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that the frequent use of this particular type of demonstrative clause in texts translated from French into Norwegian can be described as an instance of translationese.
Major corporations may as part of their communication strategy present a number of core values in the form of abstract property nouns, for example, integrity. Such nouns are rich in meaning, which gives rise to a corporate discourse associated with their interpretation. Multinational companies tend to use English as a lingua franca (ELF) to formulate these values in order to reach a global workforce, which in some cases may lead to a need for explicitation as a translation strategy to capture any cultural differences. To our knowledge, there is little prior in-depth research on corporate values, taking into account the linguistic material used, nor research into the linguistic expressions designating these as instances of discourse in their own right. The same applies to research into the implications of conveying these expressions by using ELF. On this background, we discuss corporate values from a linguistic perspective, adopting a semantic-pragmatic approach, including cultural factors and the implications of using ELF to convey their meaning. To illustrate our approach, we will present a case study of a Norwegian MNC with subsidiaries in 12 different countries.
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