Linguistic Variations Between Translated and Non-Translated English Chairman’s Statements in Corporate Annual Reports: A Multidimensional Analysis

Abstract

As an important component of a company’s annual report, the chairman’s statement offers an important channel for the chairman of the company to report on the company’s performance in unquantified and textual terms. The Chairman’s statement serves as background for the shareholders, investors and wider stakeholders to have an overview of a company’s performance and activities over the course of one year. In this study, three corpora were compiled from the annual reports of listed companies based in Mainland China, Hong Kong and the United States. A corpus-based multi-dimensional analysis was conducted to investigate the linguistic characteristics between translated and non-translated English chairman’s statements. The findings indicate that the translated chairman’s statements of Mainland Chinese companies are informationally denser and more context-independent than the non-translated ones of American and Hong Kong companies. The results of a fine-grained analysis show that the translated and non-translated chairman’s statements have significant differences regards various linguistic features, indicating that cultural differences and translation might constitute important factors in affecting the textual profiling. Our study has yielded some new evidence towards a more comprehensive understanding of the linguistic differences between translated and non-translated chairman’s statements, and enriching the existing knowledge of translational language. This study also offers some practical as well as pedagogical insights into communication issues in business English and business translation.