The quality assessment of text contents in commercial websites: A corpus-based study in product detail page localization from Spanish to Chinese

Abstract

Localization quality assessment in the Chinese context has largely focused on software systems and technical handbooks (Cui, 2013). The explosion of e-commerce underscores the need for culturally adapted websites (Liu et al., 2022). Yet very few systematic studies have been conducted on the commercial localization of Spanish product descriptions and instructions genres for the Chinese market. This paper presents the preliminary results of the first stage in a study aimed at developing and testing a set of criteria to assess the quality of localized cosmetic instructions on Chinese third-party platforms. Specifically, we focus on the genre characteristics of B2C websites in three subcorpora: original Spanish, original Chinese and translated Chinese. We have applied models of analysis of functional moves in digital genres from Swalesian genre theory (Swales, 1990; Bhatia, 1993), and found that localized Chinese descriptions show more freedom in the functional structure than their Spanish source texts. The results are expected to provide guidance for translators in order to better attract Chinese consumers.