Comparison Of Discourses Between Chinese And Western Entrepreneurs

This thesis is intended to apply theories and methodologies of cross-cultural contrastive discourse analysis to the analysis of Chinese entrepreneurs' discourses in contrast with those of western entrepreneurs'. Theories and methodologies of contrastive discourse analysis are attributed to such linguistic branches as functional grammar and pragmatics. The aim of this thesis is to show both theoretical and practical insights into the perspectives of functional discourse analysis and pragmatic discourse analysis. Differences between Chinese and western entrepreneurs' discourses in tenor, texture, politeness strategies and rhetorical strategies are some of the issues analyzed from the perspective of contrastive discourse analysis adopted in this study. By comparison, I find that Chinese and western entrepreneurs' discourses differ in formality, syntactic structures, thematic progression patterns, politeness strategies as well as the employment of metaphors and set phrases. Chinese entrepreneurs prefer formality and complexity in syntactic structure, zig-zag theme-rheme progression, inductive politeness strategy, metaphors and set phrases as well, while the western ones run to the opposite. And the last chapter focuses on the translation of Chinese and western entrepreneurs' discourses from the perspectives of thefunction of interviews, influences exerted by Chinese culture on Chinese entrepreneurs' discourses and factors influencing translators. Some proposed strategies for Chinese and western entrepreneurs' on translation for translators are mentioned in the last part of the thesis. It can be seen that the thesis possesses innovative ideas and practical values, and the translation of entrepreneurs' discourses might shed some light on the communication between Chinese and western entrepreneurs and help to promote the development of the corporate culture in China.