Balancing Local Identity and Global Audiences: Localized and Globalized Instances of EIL in Corporate Websites

As the world becomes more and more globalized and connected, transnational encounters have exponentially risen at a very rapid pace and in a multiplicity of domains: tourism, diplomacy, science, technology, politics and business. These new dynamics are posing significant challenges to global corporations and companies willing to extend their activities beyond their national borders, and have made them aware of the need for a shared language that facilitates exchanges (Louhiala-Salminen & Rogerson-Revell 2010, p. 92). Although business interactions are rarely monolingual events and most companies often mix their strategies of language choice according to the situation (Vandermeeren 1999, p. 276), in the past few decades English has been widely accepted as the principal means of communication in international business settings. This is confirmed by a poll conducted by Reuter/Ipsos in 26 countries in 2012, the results of which show that over two thirds (67 percent) of workers who deal with people beyond their national borders said that English is the language they used most often. However, it is not enough to claim that English is the most extensively used language in the globalized business world. In fact, it is necessary to determine what kind of English is going to be adopted as the chosen means for addressing international stakeholders and establishing new forms of work and collaboration on a large scale, bearing in mind that the way information is phrased is extremely important, as after all: “language matters” (Louhiala-Salminen, Rogerson-Revell, 2010: 91). Nowadays, thanks to the Internet and its unique tools, organizations are able to reach an unpredictably wide audience without being subject to time restrictions as in the case of traditional mass media (Insch 2008). Therefore web-mediated documents have come to play a fundamental role for companies. In particular, corporate websites perform the two-fold function of projecting the company’s image and promoting the company’s products. Therefore, when it comes to drafting the English version of their websites, rather than insisting on a ‘monochrome’ native-speaker standard companies should remember that, in view of the present globalisation through English and of English, they will have above all to be intelligible to other non-native speakers, rather than to native speakers only. Accordingly, they should devote particular care and attention to the features of the language employed, if they want their message to be conveyed in a clear and consistent way, so as to create an easily recognizable identity and reinforce the corporation’s vision and values. Relying mostly on a qualitative approach, the present study analyses a series of texts which should have been posted on the website of the Agency for International Business Promotion of the Modena Chamber of Commerce with a view to showing that it is possible to guide the global stakeholders to better apprehend the agency’s local identity by modifying their linguistic and structural organization.