Nowadays, commercial competition is becoming fiercer and fiercer, and with the globalization proceeding, when a company tries to expand, promote and develop, it needs to adapt itself to the open business society while not losing its own culture. Since English has been widely used in the world, an effective and suitable English website is essential for a company to use as a kind of advertisement and publicity, where its cultural values are presented.With companies' websites as subjects and Hofstede's cultural dimension theory as the theoretical basis, this study, through text content and data analysis of company profiles,strategies and cultures, tries to find out the tendency of Chinese and American companies on the five cultural value dimensions,which is power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism, masculinity and long-term orientation. Accordingly, constructive suggestions are put forward to help appease and avoid misunderstandings, and promote business communication and collaboration.
This study mainly uses the move and step analysis to conduct a contrastive genre analysis on the selected 20 Chinese ad-mission brochures(CABs) and 20 American admission brochures(AABs).Differences in moves,move sequences and step arrange-ments have revealed themselves in this comparison.Firstly,Chinese university admission brochures cast more focus on basic infor-mation about the university,the application procedure and admission criteria,while American universities,besides offering such in-formation,also emphasize the promotional function of the admission brochures.They use appealing and creative moves to commer-cially‘sell'advantages of the university to the potential applicants.Secondly,based on Kress & van Leeuwen's visual grammarsymbolic meaning,images and colors in admission brochures are also explored and analyzed as language.For one thing,after count-ing the frequency of the four categories of images,namely portrait,campus scenery,campus life pictures and graphs,it is foundthat,compared with CABs,AABs have a highly more obvious tendency in using images.The images are used as an effective tool toincrease the sense of credibility,identity-recognition,attract reader's attention,and help understanding,making the facts and in-formation more intuitive.For another thing,the main colors used in the brochures are yet another noticeable feature.Especially inAmerican brochures,universities tend to use their‘traditional colors' in the brochure to achieve a sense of consistency.Some Chi-nese brochures also follow this promotional strategy,yet a large percentage of them do not use any recognizable colors other thanthe printed black and white.Based on these differences,suggestions are put forward from perspectives including choice of movesand steps to improve the quality of CABs,hopefully raising their acceptance in the international level.
