A Contrastive Linguistic Analysis Of Written Presentation Of Company Profile--Focusing On Cultural Transfer In BE Writing

This study examines the differences and similarities in linguistic representations between American and Chinese company profiles in English, focusing on the cultural transfer occurring in the English company profiles written/translated by the Chinese. The author applies the methodologies from text linguistics under the guidance of the approach of contrastive rhetoric, which focuses on exploring the cross-cultural aspects of second language writing. Using statistics method, the author discloses quantitatively the linguistic and/or rhetorical differences between two sets of English company profiles in terms of syntactic, paragraph and textual pattern. What's more, the orientation the writers from two distinct cultures take (reader-responsible vs. writer-responsible) is also examined and discussed. The findings reveal that the two sets of texts differ significantly in using passive vs. active voice, cohesive devices, first- vs. third-person perspective, and textual patterns, etc.. With the original Chinese version of company profiles included as the supplementary texts, the author finds that these differences are primarily resulted from the cultural transfer from Chinese to English and explores the possible cultural factors as well. This study intends to contribute to the contrastive rhetoric study and business English writing, translation and teaching in Chinese context.