Cultural Values and Interpersonality in Spanish and British university websites

9 pages•Published: February 23, 2017

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to study the impact of Spaniards’ and Britons’ index of individualistic cultural values (Hofstede, 1991) on the type of engagement markers (Hyland and Tse, 2004) used in Peninsular-Spanish and British university websites along with the English translated version of the former. The cultural dimension of individualism is related to the way in which individuals from a particular culture define their own identity and their relationship with other people. As regards engagement markers, these are used to establish a social interaction in the online encounter held between universities and prospective students who may wish to study in these institutions. Following an observational and a quantitative analysis, the findings reveal important statistical differences in the three corpora analysed and show that culture and engagement markers may be considered intertwined concepts. The results obtained may be a valuable source of information for Peninsular-Spanish universities as they may help them not only to translate into English the Spanish version of their websites but also to adapt the appropriate engagement markers taking into account the British cultural framework.

Keyphrases: culture, genre analysis, metadiscourse, websites

In: Chelo Vargas-Sierra (editor). Professional and Academic Discourse: an Interdisciplinary Perspective, vol 2, pages 265--273

Links:	https://easychair.org/publications/paper/mB
	https://doi.org/10.29007/x59r