The flagship is here! Multimodal technical storytelling in localised corporate websites

Abstract

With the latest technological advances and the digital transformation in all areas of business and life, technical content has transformed into a multisemiotic and multimodal form of communication. This contribution focuses on multimodal metaphorical realisations of technical content integrated in digital storytelling in internationalised corporate websites and their localised versions. Through the analysis of three case studies it aims to describe how content is localised to the countries or regions in which a company’s products or services are marketed, how content localisation supports their respective languages and whether it is designed according to the target culture’s conventions and constraints. Concentrating on German and Greek, the analysis reveals that technical content is merged with marketing content and that similar values are projected in the two locales. However, in line with Hall’s ranking of German as a low-context and Greek as a high-context culture the German version demonstrates more explicitness. Moreover, in all three cases the websites are culturally customised through the use of different narratives along with cultural constraints. The findings can be useful both for the training of localisers and technical communicators as well as for companies interested in localising their technical content.