The influence of culture on the language of business companies’ self-presentations on Spanish and Russian websites

Abstract

This article deals with the problem of intercultural business communication between Spaniards and Russians and aims at identifying the possible points of misunderstanding between the representatives of the two countries at the moment of introducing their companies, and designing a set of strategies to avoid them. It compares the Spanish and the Russian cultures through the contrast of the linguistic patterns used by Spaniards and Russians to introduce business companies on their official websites. Geert Hofstede’s (2001/1980) five value dimension model has been taken as a basis for the analysis, and the two cultures have been compared in five aspects: individualism index, power distance index, masculinity index, uncertainty avoidance index, and long-term orientation index. For the purposes of the study two corpora were created which consisted of 30 web presentations of Spanish and Russian companies respectively: 10 belonged to travel agencies, 10 to real estate agencies, and 10 to food companies. The analysis was done with the help of the concordance programme AntConc 3.2.4w and SPSS Statistics Software Package version 20.0.0