Reframing narratives for corporate identities in the translation of corporate profiles in China multinational corporations
Facing the changing social and economic situation globally and out of the need for development, China's multinational corporations (hereafter as MNCs) resort to updating ways of "story-telling" in corporate profile translation towards overseas markets. However, it is yet to be u...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2022
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://psasir.upm.edu.my/id/eprint/99458/1/FBMK%202022%2040%20UPMIR.pdf |
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| Summary: | Facing the changing social and economic situation globally and out of the need
for development, China's multinational corporations (hereafter as MNCs) resort to
updating ways of "story-telling" in corporate profile translation towards overseas
markets. However, it is yet to be understood how story-telling reconstitutes
corporate identities in corporate profile translation from the narrative approach.
Therefore this study attempts to address the problem: how are narratives reframed
to reconstitute corporate identities in the translation of corporate profiles of China's
MNCs? The aim of the study is threefold: to determine the extent to which
narrativity features change over translation; to explore what reframing strategies
are employed behind the shift of narrativity features; to identify and analyse how
corporate identities are reconstituted by the relational networks of narrativity in
translating corporate profiles.
This research carried out an inductive qualitative study by narrative analysis. The
analysis is based on Margaret Somers' narrative identity constitution and Mona
Baker's (re)framing strategies in translation. Data are collected out of the
homogenous sampling of 12 manufacturing MNCs' profiles for in-depth
information. A combination of content analysis and thematic analysis is conducted
with the aid of Atlas ti. This study uses content analysis to detect explicit messages
such as most narrativity features and reframing strategies. Thematic analysis is
used to study the latent message concerning the relationality of parts inside the
narratives and the relational settings embedding the corporate identities.
The study's results show differences and similarities in each narrativity feature
between the samples' source and target texts. Nevertheless, there is no unified
pattern found as to how narrativity features are shifted via translation. The results indicate that corporate profiles possess a unique narrative structure. The results
also show that the strategies reframe the narratives in uneven proportions behind
the shifts in narrativity features. Besides the four core reframing strategies
proposed by Mona Baker, new strategies are found to reframe corporate profiles'
narrativity via translation, the most salient of them being reframing by overstating
or understating. Further, what translations methods are used to achieve the
strategies are clarified in this study. Lastly, the results show that the shifts in each
narrativity feature do not affect the setting separately. They work as an organic
whole in reconstitution of corporate identities from two dimensions. Most
importantly, even though the shifts in narrativity features result in different
relational settings embedding the corporate identities in the target texts, the
extents to which corporate identities are reconstituted are limited.
The significance of the study lies in three aspects. First, this study takes a fresh
approach in translation studies regarding the entire narrative as the analysis unit.
Second, the study's findings add to the present knowledge of translation methods
achieving reframing strategies and complement the current literature on reframing
narratives in translation by identifying new reframing strategies. Lastly, this study
might help other emerging MNCs find new ways to present themselves in target markets. |
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