Language and Business

Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of the German economy. Against the background of continuing globalisation, they are increasingly faced with the challenge of internationalisation. This study was designed as an empirical investigation of how well SMEs in the federal state of Saxony are prepared for this task of the future, which measures they take in order to market their products and services in the global marketplace, and it tries to identify their strengths and weaknesses in this respect. The very nature of this thesis is thus a truly interdisciplinary approach, investigating marketing aspects as well as linguistic factors. The main focus was on the language small and medium-sized companies use for their international communications. English has long become the lingua franca of the globalising economy, and this study set out to investigate how well SMEs are prepared to meet the linguistic requirements imposed on them by global business. Enterprises in the new German states are widely believed to be disadvantaged with regard to their communicative competence in English, since English played only a minor role for decades, but has risen to decisive significance within the past couple of years, taking many companies and their employees by surprise, finding them not as well prepared as their colleagues in the old German states. Still, finding their way to the new export markets in Western Europe, the Americas and Asia are vital for the survival of Saxon economy, and communicative competence in English as the lingua franca of international business is the major prerequisite for achieving this objective. Corporate communicative competence involves various aspects, including the foreign language skills of the employees ż covering the entire range of linguistic skills from oral communication including listening and speaking, giving presentations or participating in negotiations to writing skills ranging from reading and writing of various text types, including media literacy. Apart from the personal linguistic competence of the employees, the żcorporateż linguistic competence of the company also plays a major role for the perception of the company on its international markets. Therefore this study focused on investigating how well SMEs present themselves in their corporate literature and on the internet, which instruments from the wide-ranging selection of marketing tools hey apply for communicating with international markets and how the linguistic quality of their international market communications can be assessed. The objective is to provide small and medium-sized companies with a tool to maximise the effects of their international communication efforts based on the analysis of the current state of the art and on the evaluation of previous studies in this field. Theories from the field of functional stylistics provide a useful scope for such an approach. Although the aim of this study is not to establish normative requirements with regard to how corporate advertising literature should be written, a functional style analysis will provide the basis for suggestions of what could be improved with regard to the functions these text types have to fulfil. These suggestions will be based on a comparison of the established features of the text type of advertising copy with the linguistic features actually used by Saxon SMEs in their marketing materials. It is suggested that the implementation of the concept of the communications consultant will be one efficient way to improve international communication management in small and medium-sized companies. By analysing communicative tasks in SMEs and by providing a theoretical background, the concept of the communications consultant will be put on a scientific basis, and the need for professional support in international communications for SMEs will be underlined. The idea...