La communication publique des entreprises françaises et suédoises : Une étude sur la traduction de la terminologie RSE, les mots abstraits ou à la mode et les différences syntactiques

Abstract: How do Swedish and French corporate communication differ from a linguistic point of view? This paper compares corporate communication in the area of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and is based on extracts from Renault’s 2013 CSR Report. The original French report is compared to its Swedish translation made by the author of this paper. On the background of translation theories and works dealing with problematic aspects of translation the analysis focuses on three key areas: CSR terminology, buzz words, and syntactical differences.   The analysis of terminology examines the influence of English on French and Swedish CSR terminology and confirms that Swedish is open to English influence to a greater extent than French. The analysis of buzz words shows that although this type of words is common in Swedish corporate communication they are more frequently used in French. The analysis of syntactical differences deals with how lengthy French sentences are translated into Swedish and our study shows that in most cases Swedish translations tend to pass the semantic messages of such sentences by breaking them into several shorter sentences. Lastly, our analysis concludes that French, in many ways, is a more rhetoric language than Swedish.