Translating (im)personalisation in corporate discourse. A corpus-based analysis of Corporate Social Responsibility reports in English and Italian

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports constitute a relatively new form of corporate disclosure used by companies to present their values and philosophy with respect to socially relevant themes on which they may have an impact, mainly the environment, the community and employees. Companies thus publish CSR reports to communicate with a variety of stakeholders and provide information about their sustainability initiatives, with the ultimate aim of building, reinforcing, and promoting their corporate image. Personalisation plays an important role in the discursive construction of identity and in the definition of relationships between social actors. The personification of the company – obtained through 1st person plural deixis within corporate reports – is a very powerful rhetorical tool to convey a collective subject which takes responsibility for the actions and results it is giving account of, indicating and enacting a specific relationship with the reader. As a sociopragmatic item, however, it is largely language/culture-dependent, and thus represents an interesting locus to observe the impact of translation strategies on the meaning conveyed to the target audience. This paper sets out to analyse how CSR reports translated into English from Italian compare – as regards personalisation – with reports originally produced in English, in order to detect differences in the way corporate identity is construed and conveyed. The study is based on a bilingual corpus which includes translated English reports and their Italian source texts, as well as comparable originals in English and Italian. Corroborating previous research conducted on similar genres, the study shows that (im)personalisation patterns are considerably different in original and translated English CSR reports, largely due to a tendency for the latter to reproduce Italian conventions in this form of specialised discourse

Corpora worth creating: A pilot study on telephone interpreting

This paper reports on the development and use of a corpus of interpreter-mediated phone calls to study features of telephone interpreting (TI) in healthcare settings. After a short introduction on TI and corpus-based studies of remote and on-site community interpreting (CI), the paper discusses ways of exploiting the corpus to analyse interpreters\u2019 translation and coordination activities over the phone. It first shows that, notwithstanding some limitations due to data originally collected for non-linguistic purposes, even a small and raw resource can contribute to exploratory analyses of TI, using a qualitative (Conversation Analysis) approach. It then illustrates how opportunities for more systematic research are opened up by corpus annotation. The paper finally reports on some preliminary insights about linguistic and interactional aspects characterizing this type of remote interpreting and makes a tentative comparison with two on-site CI corpora, thereby paving the way to more refined and quantitative investigations

Translating (im)personalisation in corporate discourse. A corpus-based analysis of Corporate Social Responsibility reports in English and Italian

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports constitute a relatively new form of corporate disclosure used by companies to present their values and philosophy with respect to socially relevant themes on which they may have an impact, mainly the environment, the community and employees. Companies thus publish CSR reports to communicate with a variety of stakeholders and provide information about their sustainability initiatives, with the ultimate aim of building, reinforcing, and promoting their corporate image. Personalisation plays an important role in the discursive construction of identity and in the definition of relationships between social actors. The personification of the company \u2013 obtained through 1st person plural deixis within corporate reports \u2013 is a very powerful rhetorical tool to convey a collective subject which takes responsibility for the actions and results it is giving account of, indicating and enacting a specific relationship with the reader. As a sociopragmatic item, however, it is largely language/culture dependent, and thus represents an interesting locus to observe the impact of translation strategies on the meaning conveyed to the target audience. This paper sets out to analyse how CSR reports translated into English from Italian compare \u2013 as regards personalisation \u2013 with reports originally produced in English, in order to detect differences in the way corporate identity is construed and conveyed. The study is based on a bilingual corpus which includes translated English reports and their Italian source texts, as well as comparable originals in English and Italian. Corroborating previous research conducted on similar genres, the study shows that (im)personalisation patterns are considerably different in original and translated English CSR reports, largely due to a tendency for the latter to reproduce Italian conventions in this form of specialised discours

Corpora worth creating: A pilot study on telephone interpreting

This paper reports on the development and use of a corpus of interpreter-mediated phone calls to study features of telephone interpreting (TI) in healthcare settings. After a short introduction on TI and corpus-based studies of remote and on-site community interpreting (CI), the paper discusses ways of exploiting the corpus to analyse interpreters’ translation and coordination activities over the phone. It first shows that, notwithstanding some limitations due to data originally collected for non-linguistic purposes, even a small and raw resource can contribute to exploratory analyses of TI, using a qualitative (Conversation Analysis) approach. It then illustrates how opportunities for more systematic research are opened up by corpus annotation. The paper finally reports on some preliminary insights about linguistic and interactional aspects characterizing this type of remote interpreting and makes a tentative comparison with two on-site CI corpora, thereby paving the way to more refined and quantitative investigations

Multiword Expressions We Live by:A Validated Usage-based Dataset from Corpora of Written Italian

none5siThe paper describes the creation of a manually validated dataset of Italian multiword expressions, building on candidates automatically extracted from corpora of written Italian. The main features of the resource, such as POS-pattern and lemma distribution, are also discussed, together with possible applications.openFrancesca Masini, M. Silvia Micheli, Andrea Zaninello, Sara Castagnoli, Malvina NissimFrancesca Masini, M. Silvia Micheli, Andrea Zaninello, Sara Castagnoli, Malvina Nissi

Multiword Expressions We Live by: A Validated Usage-based Dataset from Corpora of Written Italian

The paper describes the creation of a manually validated dataset of Italian multiword expressions, building on candidates automatically extracted from corpora of written Italian. The main features of the resource, such as POS-pattern and lemma distribution, are also discussed, together with possible applications

Multiword Expressions We Live by:A Validated Usage-based Dataset from Corpora of Written Italian

none5siThe paper describes the creation of a manually validated dataset of Italian multiword expressions, building on candidates automatically extracted from corpora of written Italian. The main features of the resource, such as POS-pattern and lemma distribution, are also discussed, together with possible applications.openFrancesca Masini, M. Silvia Micheli, Andrea Zaninello, Sara Castagnoli, Malvina NissimFrancesca Masini, M. Silvia Micheli, Andrea Zaninello, Sara Castagnoli, Malvina Nissi