La transcreación en la gestión lingüística de sitios web corporativos del sector sanitarioAnálisis y caracterización

Abstract

In today’s globalized world, technological advances have expanded international trade opportunities more than at any other time in history. However, this new landscape has also created several communication challenges. Some of these challenges are language and cultural barriers between users in different parts of the world. This situation is particularly evident in the field of international trade, where companies establish contact through the Internet with potential users and customers from all over the world, so all companies must implement effective marketing strategies to ensure their success. Among these strategies, the corporate website stands out, which can be disseminated in several languages to bridge the gap between companies and potential users. Thus, when a company decides to use its website to reach an international audience, it faces one challenge: the linguistic diversity of its target audience. Corporations must manage multilingual and multicultural content, applying various strategies. This set of strategies is known as language management. In recent decades, one of the most prominent language management strategies has been transcreation, which has been defined as an intra- or interlinguistic reinterpretation of an original text oriented towards a target audience. However, the nature of this activity and its differences with other concepts such as translation or localization are often blurred and there is still no homogeneous definition. Moreover, transcreation has not been widely addressed in academia and many of the studies conducted have focused on the professional perspective, with few specific examples of web transcreation. Therefore, this doctoral thesis will focus on the definition of transcreation as a concept with its own entity, and, more specifically, on the transcreation of corporate websites, in order to make a significant contribution from various points of view, notably, theoretical, methodological and didactic and professional. To delimit the object of study, the analysis will focus on websites of large companies in the US healthcare sector and their language management into Spanish, and of companies the Spanish healthcare sector and their language management into English. The main objective proposed is, therefore, To analyze and characterize transcreation as a strategy for the language management of corporate websites in the healthcare sector and as an area related to Translation Studies. To achieve this main objective, five studies combining quantitative and qualitative methodologies were carried out. Study 1 is an exploratory type of research through which the objective of the study is defined. Through a Systematic Literature Review, the state of the art of transcreation research is outlined and a theoretical contribution is made to the debate on its nature. Next, Study 2 contains the didactic perspective of the doctoral dissertation. Through this study, a comprehensive model for transcreation training is developed, which includes a competency framework, proposals for disruptive methodologies, the design of didactic activities and a method for evaluating transcreation assignments. Also, it is a didactic model that can be easily implemented in the Higher Education in Translation and Interpreting. Study 3 contains two comparable analyses of the language management of corporate websites in the healthcare sector. On the one hand, it analyzes the English-Spanish management of a sample of 72 large companies in the US healthcare sector and, on the other, the Spanish-English management of a sample of 384 large companies in the Spanish healthcare sector. The results indicate that in both cases these are companies with a large online presence for which the selected language pair is particularly relevant, although it was found that the US companies are more oriented towards specific locales than the Spanish ones. During Study 4 we proceeded to design a framework for analyzing the transcreation of corporate websites from the perspective of language management. It is a framework consisting of 47 indicators evaluated on a 1-5 Likert scale of decreasing degrees of similarity and based on an exhaustive review of previous literature on localization and translation evaluation. The tests to prove the effectiveness of the framework took place during Study 5, during which transcreational strategies were analyzed in two study sub-samples consisting of 39 pairs of websites with the English-Spanish combination and 74 pairs with the Spanish-English combination. Data processing allowed us to detect three categories in the linguistic management of the websites analyzed: standardized and/or deficient localization, localization with minor transcreation presence and localization with major transcreation presence. The differences between the study sub-samples lie in the fact that, among Spanish companies, standardized or deficient localization is the most common strategy, while among US companies the three categories are uniformly present. The conclusions of the five studies provide guidelines and recommendations for designing effective language management strategies for corporate websites, which can be summarized in four steps: (1) to identify the communication objectives of the company; (2) to identify the target audience; (3) to design a communication strategy involving all stakeholders; and (4) to identify possible language management strategies.