A Comparative Genre Analysis Of Company Profiles Between Chinese And American Corporations From The Intercultural Perspective

After China's entry into WTO and three decades of opening-up reform, the economic situation has taken on a new look both at home and abroad. Increasing number of international corporations started their business in china, and Chinese companies also crossed the border to expand investment and attract talents overseas. When interacting with business partners from different countries, what makes difference is not only to understand the language, but also to comprehend the culture element. With the development of modern technology on the internet, the international business communication has been facilitated a lot. Due to its convenience and promptness, the internet has become businessmen's first choice of information collecting and distant communication. Consequently, the website plays an important role of publicizing the image and building up the reputation of one company. In particular, the company profile, which always comes first into a reader's eyes, appears much more important, because the company profile functions as a window through which people can have a general understanding of this company.In order to have a better comprehension and application of company profiles under various culture backgrounds, this study was conducted by analyzing 60 company profiles from the intercultural perspective. The inspiration of the study came from the answers to the following questions. 1) What are the genre structures of Chinese company profiles and American ones? Do any differences exist? 2) If so, how and to what degree do the culture elements influence the genre structures of the two kinds of profiles? In this study, 30 company profiles were selected from the Chinese and American Fortune 500 corporations'websites respectively. Based on the theoretical framework of genre analysis obtained from Bhatia and Swales, the texts of those company profiles were examined to find the similarities and differences. The results indicated that the genre structures of the two sets of data were similar in the macro level by sharing the same category of promotional genre and the same communicative purposes. Secondly, the differences existed in the realization of peculiar moves and steps, which were caused by the different culture backgrounds between China and America. Based on Hofstede and other researchers'theories of culture dimensions, the culture elements were explored to find out how and to what degree they affected the genre structures in Chinese and American profiles. Inspired by all that mentioned above, this study was carried out to analyze the genre structures of Chinese and American profiles and to explore cultures'influences on the genre structures from different levels, aiming at summarizing the organization features and suggesting at promoting the communication effectiveness among Chinese and American companies.