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Abstract:

Technical Communication constitutes a prerequisite for a product’s safe and efficient usage, as well as an inextricable part of its dissemination processes and branding strategy. It has to be localized, i.e. culturally adapted to the countries in which a company’s products or services are marketed, supporting their respective languages, and optimized for multilingual SEO. Traditionally, Technical Communication was offered in printed form only and took place through written discourse usually accompanied by supporting images. However, with the advent of technology and the development of digital means of communication, Technical Communication has transformed into a multisemiotic and multimodal form of communication. Dynamic pictures and videos have replaced static technical content found in imagetexts. Moreover, interactive elements allow users to share their personal experiences with the product and even become producers of Technical Communication content themselves (Kimball, 2006). In this context, technical content is no longer isolated from the company’s marketing strategy but is rather very often integrated into it through the hypermodal possibilities offered by the multimedial context in which it occurs. The brand’s storytelling can then take various forms and can become intertwined, through different traversals, with the product’s technical documentation. Thus, although technical content was formally considered mainly informative, new realities reveal that technical content can be both operative and expressive, in line with the marketing story of the brand. In the present research we will attempt to study this new form of multimodal technical content and the development of digital storytelling in localized (German and Greek) and international corporate website versions. Our main aim is to examine, comparatively and contrastively, the multisemiotic narratives that are being developed in different cultural contexts, in order to appeal to different audiences, either local or international ones. Emphasis will be placed on multimodal rhetorical tropes such as multimodal metaphors and the way they contribute to a corporate website’s narrative. Multimodal metaphors’ culture-specificity is expected to reveal discrepancies in different language versions. For the needs of our analysis methodological tools are borrowed mainly from genre theory (Reiss, 1971/2002) social semiotics (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996, 2002; Barthes, 1977) and conceptual approaches to verbal (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) and multimodal metaphor (Forceville, 1996, 2002, 2009).