A Comparative Analysis Of The Genre Features Of The Chinese And American Bank Website

Under the background of economic globalization, more and more domestic banks are paying great attention to the establishment of the homepages of their portal sites. Therefore, this thesis will analyze the homepages under the perspectives of genre analysis, comparing the genre features of Chinese ones and American ones, thus finding the deficits of domestic banks’ homepages as well as providing references for the improvements of the domestic ones. As a kind of multimodalized digital genre, homepage possesses the features of both traditional text and network medium, which has made the research of homepage genre analysis more difficult. Up till now, there are very few studies on the genre features of homepage either at home or abroad, whereas there is hardly any study on the websites of some industries or fields.This thesis has established a corpus which contained 25 homepages of Chinese banks and 25 homepages of American banks respectively. Based on the theories proposed by ESP School and the Digital Genre Analysis Model proposed by Askahave and Nielsen, this thesis has contrasted and analyzed the genres from textual dimension and medium dimension as well as discussed the choice tendencies under different cultures of colors and page layouts, the colors and page layouts are two symbolic sources which could influence more on the meaning construction of banks’ homepages.The results show that under the textual dimensions, the move structures of either Chinese bank website homepages or American ones are almost the same, while the forms, contents or frequencies of each move are different; under medium dimension, the amount of their generic link uses are similar, while their specific links are quite different. Compared with American banks’ homepages, Chinese homepages in English are tedious in content, lack of varied information, haploid, conservative and hierarchical in browse modes.