Projecting Favorable Corporate Images Through Effective Company Profiles

The writing and translation of Chinese company profiles in English is a subject seldomtouched upon in the applied linguistic research field. With relevant marketing principles,cross-cultural communication techniques and linguistic theories as the research principles, thispaper discusses the role of company profiles in establishing corporate image as well as marketcredibility. Company profiles are an important means of corporate communication that translates acertain corporate identity into a corporate image. This paper proposes "a model of an effectivecompany profile", which outlines the external variants of a company profile, (context ofculture, context of situation, cognitive mode and psychological thinking) and internal variants(effectiveness of content, communication, words, sentences, paragraphs and grammar). Allthese variants affect the effectiveness of company profiles.The paper combines qualitative and quantitative analytical methods: on the one hand, thecriteria of an effective company profile have been put forward, based on the study of a largecompany profile collection, both from China and English-speaking countries;on the otherhand, expatriate staff of multi-national corporations in Beijing have been asked to participatein the Survey of the Effectiveness of English Profiles of Chinese Companies. The outcomeshows these foreign readers particularly dissatisfied with the wording, conciseness andcultural appropriateness in the English version of Chinese company profiles.Most Chinese companies simply regard the writing or the translation of a companyprofile as a simple word-for-word rendering of the Chinese original, which results in variouskinds of problems — spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, inaccurate translation, drag-onsentences, and culture blunders, etc. Poor English proficiency seems to be a good reason for thecommunication failure, but the more fundamental reason lies in the cognitive differences andcultural differences between western countries and China.Those companies, wanting to penetrate into the world markets, have to be aware that thewriting or translation of a company profile is a cross cultural issue. They can ask forprofessional help from native-English speaking writers or from some bilingual and biculturalChinese experts, in order to create a company profile that is linguistically correct and culturallyappropriate to the foreign customers.Finally, it is suggested to incorporate relevant curriculum — "Translation and Writing ofEffective Company profiles" for example — in business English teaching program so thatbusiness English students can be prepared with the required techniques in writing ortranslating an effective company profile.