A Contrastive Genre Analysis Of Chinese And American Hotel Profiles

Since China’s accession to WTO in the year of2001, there has been a dramaticrise in exchanges between China and the rest of the world. During this process, thehotel industry is playing a significant role by being the service pillar that supportssuch exchanges. Meanwhile, as the main force of the service industry, the hotels havealso made great contribution to the economic boost in the past decades. With hotelsbeing so important, the hotel profiles which constitute the major channel to introducehotels are also important and worth exploring. Although the hotel profiles are ofstrategic importance, there are only limited studies concentrating on them accordingto the current literature. In light of these reasons, the present author intends to makehotel profiles the focus of the study.As the object of the study, eighty hotel profiles have been collected with halfbeing American hotel profiles and the other half Chinese hotel profiles. And thespecific way to carry out the study is to first contrast the genre of Chinese hotelprofiles and that of American hotel profiles from the aspects of move structure andgeneric structural potential(GSP) and then to explore reasons for their differencesfrom a cross-cultural perspective.By integrating some models and theories from several influential researchers inthis area such as Swales (1990), Bhatia (1993) and Hasan (1989), the author hasworked out a theoretical framework which guides the analyzing process. And thestudy finds that American hotel profiles are composed of six moves and seventeensteps. The six moves are Salutation, Establishing credentials, Describing the hotel,Introducing the offer, Soliciting response, and Providing contact informationrespectively. However, the Chinese hotel profiles consist by five moves and eighteenteps. Except for the move Providing contact information, all the moves found in theEnglish corpus appear in the Chinese corpus. And the difference between the twocorpuses in move structure is most saliently projected in the occurrence frequency ofthe moves and steps. For example, the move Establishing credentials, as well as thesteps Star rating, Awards occur more frequently in the Chinese corpus while the step Feature description occurs predominantly more often in the American corpus. Inaddition, there are also some salient differences between Chinese hotel profiles andAmerican hotel profiles in generic structural potential. The most obvious differenceis that the move Establishing credentials is obligatory in the Chinese corpus whileoptional in the American corpus. Meanwhile, this sequence of the move Establishingredentials is fixed and after the move Describing the hotel in the American corpuswhile it is much more flexible in the Chinese corpus. Moreover, it is also one of thetwo recurring moves in the Chinese corpus. Based on such facts, it can be seen thatthe Chinese writers of hotel profiles actually impose much more attention on theinformation related to establishing credentials.For the differences identified, the paper has tried to interpret some of them fromthe cultural perspective by referring to some culture theories like Hofstede’s CulturalDimensions and Hall’s High-context Culture and Low-context Culture. For instance,Hofstede points out that American culture values individualism while Chinese culturehighlights collectivism. To be more specific, Americans tend to emphasize more onthe exercise of the individuals’ goal and desires, independence, and self-creationinstead of conforming to the mass opinions and behaviors. In other words, Americansare much keener on being different than their Chinese counterparts. Therefore, theAmerican writers highlight the unique features of the hotels much more often thantheir Chinese counterparts and thus cause the frequency of the step Featuredescription to be much higher in the American corpus than in the Chinese one.Through a contrastive genre analysis on American and Chinese hotel profiles, itis helpful to gain a better understanding about the generic structures of the hotelprofile genre and thus enables us to be informed of what to write and how to arrangethe information when composing an English hotel profile. Besides, the study can alsoremind us to pay particular attention to the cultural differences so as to write moreeffective English hotel profiles which convey their communicative purposes better.