Communicating cooperation in multilingual business settings — translating corporate philosophies from English into German

Business texts that are communicated across language borders either are written in the lingua franca English or are adapted to the target readership by being translated into the respective target language. The task of translating such texts is one of the key issues in corporate communication in their function to produce texts to communicate with multilingual readers. This task may often present complex linguistic problems, especially in certain text types, as the statement in an interview with a senior manager of an English — Dutch multinational company reveals: “Our company is in the middle of a cultural change process. We believe that issues related to a cultural change process can only be tackled if everyone in the company gets involved in them. Therefore, it is important for us to generate a debate about our strategy, our creed, our values and to formulate a corporate vision to communicate to everyone involved as to where the journey is going. However, texts communicating values, visions and creeds are still not as widely known and accepted in Germany whereas they are quite well established in France and in England and especially the USA. Translating texts especially such as these present a huge problem, in a company like ours. Values must be communicated with a lot of emotions, they must be easy to remember and they must show how everything in a company is tied up with values. Different nationalities in our company react differently to them, for instance our German colleagues in our company tend to be highly sceptical of emotionally charged texts such as these.” (Tonstead 2000: 2)