This thesis explores how newly-formed, short-term, multicultural project teams develop ways to manage their interactions in project-team meetings. The research took place within a management integration programme at a multinational company in France. A number of models have been proposed in international business on international teamwork (e.g. small group development processes, international team life-cyles, features of internal team functioning). However, these models provide little or no detail on the interactional processes that team members experience as they move through the different stages of development. Research within applied linguistics and education, on the other hand, provides frameworks for analysing interactional processes. For example, frameworks such as ‘activity types’ and ‘communication of practice’ have posited that communication is regulated by a system of rules and norms as to the expected interpersonal and verbal behaviour. However, when new teams are forming, appropriate behavioural practices need to be created for teams to be operationally effective. Yet, little or no research has explored how this occurs within international teams. In my research I aim to fill this gap by examining the interactional processes of international teams during their formative stages. Using an ethnographic-like case-study method to examine three teams, this study explores the interaction processes that occurred as team members learned to work together, the similarities and differences in the establishment of these processes across teams and the factors that were perceived as playing an influencing role. Key findings from the research are that establishing rules and setting up roles were beneficial to teamwork, while language differences rather hindered operational effectiveness. Other factors that affected the project-team workshops across all teams appeared to be interpersonal team relations and corporate culture and values.

Cross-cultural communication has acquired particular significance in contemporary societies, where the world-wide traffic of people, goods and ideas, which has impacted upon social and cultural values, raises debates over globalisation issues. Translation plays a crucial role in these interchanges, by mediating the socio-cultural contacts between different language communities. The present study aims to look into the translation of advertisements that cross borders, and that are part of the cross-cultural flow. It will attempt to describe and discuss the translation strategies employed in the translation of perfume and cosmetics print advertisements in to Portuguese.F or this purpose, a selection of English and Portuguese advertisements of the major brands of these products has been made, so as to (a) outline the main translation approaches adopted in the translation into Portuguese, (b) compare them to the major approaches adopted in English advertisements of the same type, (c) discuss major issues in translation studies raised by the specificity of international advertising, and (d) infer some of the (cultural) factors conditioning these options. This analysis will consider the different constitutive dimensions of these multimodal messages, namely pictorial and verbal elements, the combination of which is believed to influence the translational approaches and processes. This study also seeks to demonstrate that discursive features and translation strategies a re-connected with the societies they are part of and hence both affect and reflect the existing cultural conditions and power relations. This view of discursive practices, particularly translation, as part of the wide cultural system, has required an approach that draws on different disciplines, namely discourse and serniotic analysis, media studies in advertising and international marketing, as well as studies in translation.

This thesis investigates the advertising strategies used in marketing cars in Italy and the UK, with particular reference to the employment of translation. Fieldwork has been undertaken within advertising agencies, with a view to establishing how translation is used, whether translators in the industry are professionally trained and how significant translation is generally maintained to be. The role of advertising agencies in both contexts has been considered in terms of their development over time and their cultural prominence. A qualitative analysis of a corpus of Italian and British car advertisements from the 1980s to the present has been undertaken, with the aim of determining how car advertisements have changed across two decades, during which advertising techniques have tended to become more complex and both societies have undergone significant changes. This is particularly apparent with regard to issues of gender representation and the balance between verbal and visual text. The analysis of the corpus focuses on the use of translation. It is suggested that car advertisements, as cultural products, are reconstituted and rewritten when translated, so that advertisements of the same product tend to be very different across cultures, both in terms of textual content and visuals. Investigating the cultural value of advertisements demonstrates the continuing tension between perceptions of what is termed ‘mechanical translation’ and ‘creative rewriting’ as well as the social and economic value ascribed to each in marketing discourses. The general aim of the thesis is to establish the involvement of translation in economic and cultural exchanges within which advertising plays a part. It is argued that despite what advertising professionals appear to believe, the cultural and economic impact of advertising is assisted by translation, which plays a significant role in the transmission of information and values.

Professional intercultural communication is of growing importance in today’s globalising world. This study analyses the dynamics of relating that occurred between Chinese officials and American officials and other professionals during a three-week delegation visit to the USA. Drawing on concepts and frameworks in pragmatics, sociolinguistics, cross-cultural psychology, communication studies and translation studies, it takes a data-driven approach to explore Chinese officials’ professional interaction with American/British professionals. This kind of interaction, which involved government officials, has rarely been studied before. During the delegation visit, over twenty authentic professional intercultural events including formal meetings and banquets were recorded in six major cities in the USA. Relational issues and the interactants’ interpretations of these issues from both sides were extracted and examined from twenty-hour-long video recordings and two-hour-long audio recordings of official interaction, fifteen-thousand-word notes of the delegation’s evening meetings where they reflected on the day’s events, forty-one individual post-event and post-trip interviews with the Chinese and fourteen open-ended questionnaire responses from the Americans. Taking a first order approach, I place the interactants’ perspectives at the core and significantly reduce my interference by starting from the natural and spontaneous reflections made by the participants in the evening meetings. I then check the generality of the findings by comparing them with a second dataset which comprises eighty-six narrative accounts of Chinese-non-Chinese professional communication reported by thirty-seven Chinese officials and three businesspeople. My analysis takes a developmental perspective, and reveals the complexities of relational management as it unfolds over time. A number of different norms and interactional principles emerge, and my investigation of relational management combines motivational (e.g., Rapport Management theory) and descriptive aspects (e.g., dialectical theory). The study contributes to our understanding of the conceptualization and operationalization of the key concepts face, politeness and relations as well as the major practical concerns of gifts, hosting and interactional styles, including language and interpreting. For example, the findings suggest that while the concepts face, politeness, guanxi and the “relational”, i.e., relations/relationships/relating, tend to be conflated and remain largely entangled in the literature, all of them are distinguishable. First, face and politeness are conceptually distinct, and their connection is not as strong as we have assumed. Second, while both face and guanxi can be viewed as enduring yet not static entities, they are two separate concepts. Guanxi work is much broader than facework and face is only one of the major motivations behind it. Yet guanxi dynamics frequently have face implications. Face can be gained when guanxi goes well and is very likely to be lost when it goes wrong. Additionally, face and the “relational” are not synonymous. In spite of the emerging call for a relational study of face, it is not a property of a relationship and merely analysing it in talk-in-interaction is inadequate.

The thesis argues that by mapping three selected discursive practices – Explanations, Accounts, and Formulations – and by interpreting their respective roles and interrelations, it is possible to assess how, through talk, decisions are developed and implemented in meetings. Drawing on a longitudinal, year-long observation of business meetings undertaken by managerial teams in a large UK Chamber of Commerce and on analyses of authentic audio data, the thesis investigates how decision making is enacted in meetings discourse in the context of organisational change. A structured, Conversation-analytical approach is employed to examine the transcribed data and develops a macro-/micro- matrix within which to understand the behaviour and influences of the practices on decision-making. The research specifically expands the role of Explanations and furthers the established communicative properties of Accounts and Formulations proposed in the ground-breaking work of Scott and Lyman (1968) and Heritage and Watson (1979), respectively. Most importantly, the analysis identifies the significance of long turns in the meetings data, and documents the link between decision-making and the recurrence and clustering of the three practices in or around these.