National Cultures and English Versions of Corporate Websites
Evgeny Kiselev (Kobe Pharmaceutical University)
Abstract
This study explores content features of English versions of corporate websites offered by Japanese and Russian companies. The companies are selected based on the “Brand Finance Banking 500” rating, and Japan and Russia are selected with reference to Hofstede’s cultural model(Hofstede et al. 2010). First of all, this study intends to reaffirm the extent to which the English website versions of selected non-English companies exhibit different cultural features, both in content and in appearance, and then to determine whether Hofstede’s model may account for these differences. A contrastive analysis approach was adopted for this study of the websites’ content from a cultural perspective. The findings revealed that some aspects of the content features may be construed with reference to Hofstede’s framework, thus further illuminating the relationship between business and culture.