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 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.

Text FBMK 2022 40 UPMIR.pdf Download (1MB)

Actions (login required)

View Item