A Study On The Multimodal Construction Of The Corporate Image Of Huawei Based On Website Translation

Strengthening the construction of corporate image has evolved into a key strategy for Chinese businesses looking to expand internationally as economic globalization continues to accelerate.The corporate image construction of Huawei is a significant benchmark for other domestic businesses entering overseas markets,and in today’s digital media era,websites are the primary platform for businesses to display their images due to the benefits of real-time and widespread coverage.Therefore,this thesis selects the English website of Huawei as the object of research and develops a multimodal critical discourse analysis framework for website translation by combining systematic functional grammar,visual grammar,and a three-dimensional analysis framework.A descriptive study is conducted on the website of Huawei.The author explores the multimodal characteristics and corporate image of the English website through text analysis,interprets the multimodal strategy of the corporate image construction from discourse practice and explains the influence factors for the multimodal strategy from social practice.The study finds that the corporate image of Huawei is constructed by linguistic and non-linguistic symbols.High-frequency words indicate that Huawei conveys its image from multiple perspectives,such as business development,environmental protection,and a people-oriented approach.Image symbols convey the message around product display,team building,enterprise scale,etc.Linguistic and non-linguistic modality jointly convey the corporate image of being pragmatic,enterprising,and socially responsible.To better convey the corporate image to its target users,Huawei adopts a multimodal construction strategy.Firstly,at the linguistic modality level,Huawei uses the first person “we” and “our” to narrow the psychological distance between Huawei and users.The medium and low-value modal verbs are used to make its expressions of views and ideas calm and polite,which will be helpful for users to accept the corporate image.Secondly,at the translation level,the translator adopts a culture-oriented translation strategy for the target market,which reduces strangeness in the target text by amplification,omission,adaptation and thick translation.Thirdly,at the level of non-linguistic modality,Huawei strives to create a good reading experience for its target users through modality transformation,modality combination,and modality localization.The reason why Huawei adopts a multimodal strategy to construct its corporate image is influenced by specifications for website localization and policies of target market,while the specific image presented is determined by its own marketing practices and strategies.This study is an exploratory attempt to apply multimodal critical discourse analysis in translation,which is beneficial to the interdisciplinary study of translation.Moreover,it has practical guiding significance for other enterprises to construct their corporate images and will also be helpful for translators who want to engage in website translation.