earticle

영어

This pilot study aims to explore the differences in text politeness between translated (from Korean to English) and non-translated business texts by analyzing their textual and interpersonal metadiscourses. Text politeness here is defined as linguistic and non-linguistic resources that a writer employs to guide his/her readers along the progress of the text and build relationship with them. Business texts analyzed in this paper is the Letter to the Shareholders, the most-read part of a corporate Annual Report. Three sets of texts were collected for the study: Korean texts, their English translations and English texts originally produced by global companies. This paper first introduces the need to research translated business texts as a textual interaction between the writer and the readers which is under an influence of culture and society. Then it is followed by the concept of metadiscourses which refer to a variety of cohesive and interpersonal features designed to help readers relate a text to its context, revealing the writer's awareness of the presence of the reader. The analysis of metadiscourses in the translations(TT) and non-translations(ET) showed that transitions and self mentions were the most-frequentlyused textual metadiscourses and interpersonal metadiscourses respectively in both TT and ET of the study. But the two data sets differ in that ETs employ more code glosses and hedges while TTs' use of them are limited. The analysis result might be stemmed from the cultural differences in the writer-reader distance and the concept of being polite in presenting the writer's idea to the readers.