Translating corporate image. On translational shifts in mission statements

Abstract

Mission statement is a genre of corporate management addressed to a large and diversifi ed group of recipients. The aim of the investigated genre is to persuade them to accept the goals and actions of a corporation. It is the choice of relevant generic and register forms which plays a major role in the accomplishment of aims of a mission statement. Almost any contemporary handbook on management addresses the issue of the function and content of a mission statement. This contrasts with the relatively limited interest of linguists in this genre. The analysis presented below draws mainly on the research made by Priscilla Rogers and John Swales (1990), John Swales and Priscilla Rogers (1995), Piotr Mamet (2005), and Maja Wolny-Peirs (2005). The aim of the study is to investigate how certain translational shifts might alter the corporate image of the company. The analysed disourse features cover grammatical metaphor, lexical choice, omission, as well as syntactic and lexical interference.