Business Texts Research Articles

Language and business: Patterns in the annual report translations of public companies in Indonesia

The economic benefits of English proficiency and the pervasive use of English in business communications have increased the demand to translate business texts. As a part of the business text genre, an annual report is translated into English as a form of information disclosure for foreign investors of a public company in Indonesia. This study aims to explore translation patterns in annual reports from Indonesian to English using Catford’s classification of translation shifts and Becher’s classification of explicitations and implicitations. This research employed a mixed-method approach with both qualitative and quantitative analyses. The data sources were six annual reports of Indonesian public companies in three sectors (financial, non-cyclical consumer, and energy) obtained from each company’s official website. By applying qualitative and quantitative approaches, the analyses reveal patterns of annual report translation. The findings of this study indicate that there were significant differences between annual reports in various sectors, as evidenced by the chi-square test result (X2(4, N = 138) = 20.21, p .001) and by variations in how translation shifts are used. Patterns in translating annual reports from Indonesian to English were identified, namely the use of explicitations and implicitations in interactional, cohesive, and denotational manners through translation shifts. The results of this study suggest that annual report translation was made possible through shifts involving changes in syntactic structure and the choice of information to be added, omitted, or substituted.

Understanding lexico-semantic opposition empty/full in official business texts: Quantitative and qualitative research

This paper discusses the lexical-semantic opposition EMPTY/FULL in the corpus of legal, military and medical texts. The study analyzes 130 official business texts, in which we examined the problem of defining and constructing the lexical-semantic opposition EMPTY/FULL. The analysis promoted the construction of quantitative sampling, which demonstrates the weight of the lexemes in the corpus of official business texts. The purpose of the proposed analysis was to determine the distribution of the lexical-semantic opposition EMPTY/FULL, especially to find out the total number of occurrences, the average number of occurrences and the edge limits of the lexeme EMPTY and the lexeme FULL in the corpus of texts. The main results of the study outline the diversity of the lexical-semantic opposition EMPTY/FULL in different contexts, that underlines the functional diversification of the lexeme EMPTY and lexeme FULL. The results showed that in legal texts lexemes EMPTY/FULL nominate a legal concept; in medical texts they perform the function of medical conditions assessment; within the limits of military texts, they establish an associative connection between the nomination and semantic components (military actions, targets and objects of military use, consequences of war). Another important finding was the determination of the dominant lexeme in the corpus of legal texts and the dominant lexeme in the corpus of military texts. The similarities between EMPTY and FULL are primarily due to their antonymy. However, their differences are fixed in their distinct core meanings, contextual usage, pragmatic significance and connotations. These differences make them adaptable in various contexts of military, legal and medical texts to convey precise and often contrasting information about the state of objects and concepts.

Politeness Conversational Strategies in Business Texts: A State-of-the-art Review

Politeness Conversational Strategies in Business Texts: A State-of-the-art Review

Grammatical Cohesion in English and Arabic Business Texts: A Contrastive Discoursal Analysis

The current study centres around uncovering the functions and types of grammatical cohesion in structuring business texts in English and Arabic newspapers. Unequivocally, it aims to unravel the possible similarities and differences in the English and Arab journalistic registers in terms of grammatical cohesion. Moreover, the study is built on two hypotheses. First, there are differences in the frequencies of grammatical cohesive tools manipulated by English and Arabic writers. Unlike their Arabic counterparts, the English articles tend to involve more realizations of grammatical cohesive patterns. Second, both English and Arabic journalists exhibit a general tendency to take advantage of the same types of grammatical cohesion in their business articles. Ten articles have been selected from The Guardian and Ashareq Al-Awsat newspaper websites as data for analysis. Five articles have been picked from each newspaper. Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) model of grammatical cohesion has been applied to the selected articles in both languages. The results show that reference and conjunction exist profoundly in the two newspapers. On the contrary, substitution and ellipsis have almost disappeared in both corpora.

Методика оценивания качества переводов студентов в рамках дисциплины «Официально-деловой перевод» как средство совершенствования профессиональных компетенций будущих переводчиков

The study aims to substantiate the need to use a methodology for assessing the quality of student translations in the course “Official Business Translation” as part of improving the professional training of future translators. The paper presents a practical experience of conducting classes on the translation of official business texts and assessing the translations, as well as students’ solutions of translation tasks. The scientific novelty of the work lies in developing a methodology for assessing the quality of student translations as a way to improve the process of teaching future translators how to render official business texts and as a means of improving their professional competencies. The results showed that the improvement of students’ knowledge and skills in the field of official business translation is possible, including through the use of a certain methodology for assessing student translations.

A Brief Analysis of Business English Students’ “Knowledge Deficit”: Taking the Business English Reading Course as an Example

In addition to the English language knowledge and skills, students majoring in Business English should also master knowledge and skills in the various fields of business, intercultural communication, humanities, and social sciences. However, in the teaching practice of Business English students, the author finds that many of them face a “Knowledge Deficit” in learning, which refers to that students have very limited business knowledge, or their business knowledge cannot be interacted with their English Language knowledge when dealing with business texts, resulting in their obstacles when dealing with business texts and difficulty in forming a business thinking-pattern. Therefore, efforts should be made in many aspects so as to address this problem. In this paper, the author aims to analyze the “Knowledge Deficit” in teaching and learning of Business English by reviewing the role of knowledge in reading comprehension theoretically, exemplifying with some cases from his classroom teaching, analyzing the causes, and providing some tentative solutions.

Restructuring Russian Christian Personal Names in the Pre-National Period: Names in -y

This article is the concluding part of a series of articles investigating the derivation of the geographically limited system of Christian personal name forms during the pre-national period. Drawing on anthroponyms from Tver business texts of the 16th–17th centuries, it explores the structural reorganization of full male personal names in colloquial speech. The focus of the analysis is on the productive paradigmatic class *-jŏ, specifically full forms of anthroponyms with a soft base (ending in -y) in different variants: -iy, -ey, -ay, -oy. During the period studied, these colloquial full forms were highly diverse, with numerous phonetic and morphological variants. These variants primarily emerged from fictitious segmentation and formal alteration of the anthroponymic bases. At the same time, preference in documents is given to colloquial rather than canonical forms, which were used mainly by clergymen. The article identifies the word-formation mechanisms that facilitated the integration of foreign personal names into the Russian onomastic system, leading to the development of numerous colloquial full forms of names, particularly through structural reorganization and formal-associative relationships involving modifications to the final segment of the name. These structural transformations, combined with phonetic changes, create a unique anthroponymic pattern specific to each territory. The analysis reveals that in the 16th–17th centuries Tver documents, two forms of Christian personal names were particularly stable and frequently recurring: consonant-final truncated forms (e.g., Vlas, Nazar, Taras, Fedos) and forms ending in -ey (e.g., Vlasey, Nazarey, Tarasey, Fedosey).

EFL STUDENTS’ DIFFICULTIES IN UNDERSTANDING BUSINESS ENGLISH TEXTS

Students who learn business or economics subjects might read different business texts related to their majors. However, many English as a Foreign language (EFL) students are still struggling with their reading comprehension abilities The objectives of the study are to identify students’ perceptions of common difficulties when reading Business English texts and to explore their attitude towards a number of solutions. The participants were ninety-six Business English students who enrolled in a Business English Reading course at a public economics university in Ho Chi Minh City. A five-Likert questionnaire and a semi-structured interview were employed to collect the data for the study. The results show that EFL students often encountered difficulties in reading Business texts. The most prominent factors influencing Business English reading comprehension generally are Vocabulary, Timing, and Background Knowledge. To address those issues, Business English students proposed six solutions regarding lexical and grammatical knowledge enhancement, regular practice, metacognitive strategies, participation in business courses, and online dictionary use. These recommendations collectively aimed to empower students in mastering the skills of Business English reading comprehension.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/soc/0101/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Representation of the “business‐self”: Professionals’ construction of multifaceted identities in written business communication

AbstractThis study explores professionals’ construction of their multifaceted identities as representatives of their corporations in business writing. The self‐mention framework is applied to explore the representation of the “business‐self” which I propose encompasses the projection of individual, collective, and corporate identities. A corpus of 100 CEO's letter to shareholders was examined for the use of personal pronouns and company referential terms and collocation analysis performed to understand the surrounding discourse contexts. The findings reveal a distinct hierarchy of identities; US business professionals communicate with stakeholders by immersing themselves in the identity of the collective and make a concerted effort to project the corporate identity, whereas representation of the individual self is minimal. The study provides important insights into the identity construction work undertaken by professionals in authentic business texts and the findings can help inform English for Specific Purposes (ESP) practitioners of business communication courses in higher education.

THE MAIN FEATURES OF TERM-COMBINATION HIGHLIGHTING IN CORPUS-APPLIED TRANSLATION STUDIES

The article is dedicated to the analysis of the main features of term-combination highlighting in corpus-applied translation studies. The fundamental theoretical milestones of the emergence of quantitative indicators for identifying term combinations in a text corpus, corpus-based indicators of contextual adequacy, and corpus-based indicators of grammatical consistency have been defined. It is worth noting that the strengthening of logical determinism of the linguistic phenomenon reflects an integrated hierarchical approach to document classification based on word distance in corpus-applied translation studies. This is explained by clustering meaningful units that can be unambiguously identified and translated into quantitative indicators that correlate with term-combinations. The research justifies the use of a data metric that allows tracking the genre groups of relevant documents and proposes additional research potential in the field of terminology research in official and business texts of NATO, UN, WTO. The mechanism for evaluating vector representations of term-combinations established on official and business documents, designed to reflect semantic similarity between words, sentences, and texts, is revealed. The scientific inquiry substantiates the use of cosine distance to represent a word in input data and in language models, which serve as a means of computation during document comparison and incorporate the terminology of international organizations such as NATO, UN, WTO. It is proven that an important aspect of the quantitative indicator is ensuring consistency of the analyzed phenomenon, which contributes to the precision of reproducing epistemological terminology. Additionally, a valuable reference point in the process of reproducing term-combinations in corpus-based applied translation studies is the corpus-based indicator of contextual adequacy, which involves contextual analysis where the term-combination is used. The presented feature of contextual adequacy expands the linguistic formality of official and business texts. Thus, the scientific article emphasizes the axiomatic function of the aforementioned characteristics, which lies in reproducing term-combinations in different contexts to conceptually understand semantic nuances of language elements and consider lexical-semantic regularities of term combination reproduction. It is revealed that the corpus-based indicator of grammatical consistency draws attention to the specificity of adequate grammatical structures in corpus-applied translation studies, which contributes to preserving the overall structure and semantics of the text during the translation of term-combinations and demonstrates heuristic models, grammatical guidelines, and priorities of grammatical correspondence between the original and the translation.

ECOLINGUISTIC APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF MODERN ELECTRONIC BUSINESS COMMUNICATION

ECOLINGUISTIC APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF MODERN ELECTRONIC BUSINESS COMMUNICATION

Text to Causal Knowledge Graph: A Framework to Synthesize Knowledge from Unstructured Business Texts into Causal Graphs

This article presents a state-of-the-art system to extract and synthesize causal statements from company reports into a directed causal graph. The extracted information is organized by its relevance to different stakeholder group benefits (customers, employees, investors, and the community/environment). The presented method of synthesizing extracted data into a knowledge graph comprises a framework that can be used for similar tasks in other domains, e.g., medical information. The current work addresses the problem of finding, organizing, and synthesizing a view of the cause-and-effect relationships based on textual data in order to inform and even prescribe the best actions that may affect target business outcomes related to the benefits for different stakeholders (customers, employees, investors, and the community/environment).

Semantic Challenges of Business Translation with Reference to English and Arabic: A Product-Oriented Approach

This study aims to investigate the various types of challenges and limitations at semantic levels that translators face in the business and economic translation products of tenders and bids from English into Arabic. To achieve the objectives of the study, a sample of four tenders of business documents was collected from a variety of national and international non-governmental organizations such as the bilingual specialized texts that were published between 2019 and 2020 in Iraq, specifically in Erbil, Kurdistan Region. The study relies on Holmes’ map (1988) of descriptive translation studies, developed by Toury (1995). To answer the research questions: how does a translator deal with specialised terminologies and expressions in translating business tenders and bids and what effect and role do semantic changes play in business and economic translation products? The study employs the analytical-descriptive translation methodology in analysing business texts. The analysis of business and economic texts has revealed that inaccurate synonyms at the semantic level, such as using different synonyms and translating semantic collocations, appear more frequently than other issues in translating business texts in the target language. The findings of the study have indicated that business and economic terms may have more than one accurate and faithful translation. Nevertheless, one translation can be appropriate and accurate. The study has concluded that cultural phenomena rarely appear in business and economic tenders and bids in comparison with other areas of economic and business texts, e.g., metaphors and idioms in general business texts.

Types of nostalgia and its causes

This study aims to investigate the various types of challenges and limitations at semantic levels that translators face in the business and economic translation products of tenders and bids from English into Arabic. To achieve the objectives of the study, a sample of four tenders of business documents was collected from a variety of national and international non-governmental organizations such as the bilingual specialized texts that were published between 2019 and 2020 in Iraq, specifically in Erbil, Kurdistan Region. The study relies on Holmes’ map (1988) of descriptive translation studies, developed by Toury (1995). To answer the research questions: how does a translator deal with specialised terminologies and expressions in translating business tenders and bids and what effect and role do semantic changes play in business and economic translation products? The study employs the analytical-descriptive translation methodology in analysing business texts. The analysis of business and economic texts has revealed that inaccurate synonyms at the semantic level, such as using different synonyms and translating semantic collocations, appear more frequently than other issues in translating business texts in the target language. The findings of the study have indicated that business and economic terms may have more than one accurate and faithful translation. Nevertheless, one translation can be appropriate and accurate. The study has concluded that cultural phenomena rarely appear in business and economic tenders and bids in comparison with other areas of economic and business texts, e.g., metaphors and idioms in general business texts.

THE CONCEPT OF EQUIVALENCE OF CLICHES AND STAMPS (BASED ON THE MATERIAL OF RUSSIAN AND KOREAN OFFICIAL BUSINESS LANGUAGE)

In this paper we are interested in translation at the level of a word combination. A word combination can represent a semantic unity both at the level of language. The most striking example of such a translation is the translation of idiomatic or stable (phraseological) word combinations. The process of translation of official business texts is closely connected with the use of stable constructions, clichés and stamps that belong to the differentiated special phraseology, without which the translation of a business text cannot be qualitative and will seem unnatural to the recipient.

Жанроориентированная методика обучения письменной речи на русском языке как иностранном (на примере жанра «рекомендательное письмо»)

The research focuses on the relevant pedagogical problem of the formation of genre thinking as a foreign language communicative competence component. The article is part of the authors' project aimed at creating a genre-based approach to teaching Russian as a foreign language. It presents a genre-based approach to teaching writing in Russian as a foreign language on the example of the recommendation letter genre. The authors not only developed but also tested this teaching format. The authors substantiated the research methodology using Russian and foreign scholars' modern research. They consider concepts “genre-based approach”, “genre literacy”, “genre competence” as important for the study; define the concept of speech genre by characterizing the content of genreforming parameters. As an example of applying the genre-based approach to teaching writing, the authors give the system of working with a recommendation letter with its genre varieties such as (1) informal, friendly letter of recommendation; (2) private official letter of recommendation; (3) business letter of recommendation. The authors note that the application of the presented approach involves compliance with two principles: (1) the teacher should know the genre features of the genre students study; (2) all language means of the text should be selected and explained taking into account their focus on the implementation of genre parameters of the studied speech genre. The genre features of the recommendation letter are clarified, the stages of the implementation of the genre-oriented methodology are characterized and justified, a set of genre-oriented tasks and a genre-oriented system for evaluating the results of students' productive speech activity in writing are proposed. The authors conclude that the methodology of teaching written speech focused on the implementation of genre parameters in the text, allows students to form stable skills of productive speech activity, providing the ability to produce texts of the studied genres in real situations of written communication. At the same time, this approach can be used when teaching the writing of not only scientific and business texts, but also genres of private official correspondence, as well as friendly correspondence, which is less codified, but still has certain features. The next advantage of the proposed approach is the importance of stable genre skills formation in the field of foreign language writing, since students in the future, if necessary, will be able to transfer them to their native language.

Means of the Expressing Sentiment in the Conditions of Modern Business Internet Correspondence in Russian, English and Chinese Languages

This research is devoted to the analysis of the means of expressing sentiment in business internet correspondence. The purpose of the study: review and study of the means of expressing tonality in an official business style; determination of the tone of business texts using various means on the material of business internet correspondence in Russian, English, Chinese. The objective of the study: to supplement the classification of means in three languages (taking into account their specifics) to determine the tone of the text and to distinguish the means of expressing the tone for business internet correspondence.

LINGUISTIC AND MENTAL ASPECTS OF THE TRANSLATION OF OFFICIAL TEXTS (BASED ON THE OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS OF PRESS SERVICES AND NEWS PORTALS)

Background. The translation process is to be considered not merely as a cross- language, but as a cross-cultural interaction as well, since two language systems and two cultures operate simultaneously. The translator’s mission is to adequately transfer the source code of information into the translation language and adapt the national and cultural features of the original text. This involves mental processing of the underlying message implications and presuppositions. Strategies and methods of translation of official documents are determined not only by their linguistic characteristics, but also by their national-specific features. The above-mentioned aspects contribute to the background of the study.
 Purpose. The article deals with the analysis of the lexical and syntactic features of the translation of official business texts through the prism of the national cultural code, as well as reveals the influence of mental features of various linguistic and cultural communities on the linguistic, structural and style-forming characteristics of business texts.
 Materials and methods. The empiric material for the study is represented by 70 official documents of international organizations in English (UNESCO, The Minsk Declaration, U.S. Mission Russia, etc.) and their corresponding Russian translations. The documents are published in an open access on the Internet on the official websites of press services and news portals. In the course of analyzing the sources of actual material, general scientific methods of analysis and synthesis, cognitive analysis, and content analysis were used.
 Results. The results of the study proved that the national-cultural specificity has a direct impact on the linguistic, structural and style-forming characteristics of official business texts. To ensure the adequacy of a translation in the recipient language, cognitive processing of the source code through the prism of the semantic space of the translator’s culture is required. Recurrent methods of translating of official documents are the techniques of generalization, specification, addition, zero translation and integration.
 Conclusion. Official business texts are marked by certain functional characteristics that must be taken into consideration in the process of translation to ensure its adequacy and communicative effect.

A MODEL OF THE ENGLISH-UKRAINIAN SUB-CORPUS OF TEXTS OF NATO, UN AND WTO OFFICIAL AND BUSINESS DOCUMENTS

A MODEL OF THE ENGLISH-UKRAINIAN SUB-CORPUS OF TEXTS OF NATO, UN AND WTO OFFICIAL AND BUSINESS DOCUMENTS

Ways of Predicate Expressing in the Act Book of the Zhytomyr Hrodsky Government of 1611

The article analyzes the ways of predicate expressing in the Act Book of the Zhytomyr Hrodsky government in 1611. The main source for the study of the specified main part of a sentence was the above-mentioned manuscript of the official business style of the beginning of the 17th century. It is the style of the act book that determined the functioning of the predicate mostly in the past tense forms, given the record of court cases about already committed crimes. The method of sampling the analyzed material and the technique of linguistic statistics gave reasons to state that the most used simple verb predicate (950 word forms) in the manuscript is expressed by a verb in the form of the past perfect tense, mostly masculine, since both the scribes and the complainants were mostly masculine gender, although at the same time predicates in the forms of the feminine gender, the plural, and sporadically the present and future tenses are also occasionally recorded. In addition, the functioning of simple verb predicates with the preservation of ancient verb forms of the past tense perfect and rarely the plusquamperfect were noted. The compound verb predicate (66 usages) in the studied official business texts traditionally consists of an auxiliary verb in all tenses and most often the word must and an infinitive with the suffix -ty. The frequency of functioning is also demonstrated by the compound nominal predicate, used 47 times in the manuscript, with the predominance of the verb-adjective as the main component of this main member of the sentence, mostly in combination with the linking verb to be in various tense forms. The fact that the manuscript belongs to the official-business style determined the frequency of the use of predicates expressed by the verb form in -no, -to (149 usages). The analyzed system of expressing the predicate in the Act Book of the Zhytomyr Hrodsky government in 1611 confirms the general tendency of the functioning of this main part of a sentence in the specified period of the Old Ukrainian language in manuscripts of the official-business style and demonstrates its persistence to the modern period.