As an important component of a company's annual report, the chairman's statement offers an important channel for the chairman of the company to report on the company's performance in unquantified and textual terms. The Chairman's statement serves as background for the shareholders, investors and wider stakeholders to have an overview of a company's performance and activities over the course of one year. In this study, three corpora were compiled from the annual reports of listed companies based in Mainland China, Hong Kong and the United States. A corpus-based multi-dimensional analysis was conducted to investigate the linguistic characteristics between translated and non-translated English chairman's statements. The findings indicate that the translated chairman's statements of Mainland Chinese companies are informationally denser and more context-independent than the non-translated ones of American and Hong Kong companies. The results of a fine-grained analysis show that the translated and non-translated chairman's statements have significant differences regards various linguistic features, indicating that cultural differences and translation might constitute important factors in affecting the textual profiling. Our study has yielded some new evidence towards a more comprehensive understanding of the linguistic differences between translated and non-translated chairman's statements, and enriching the existing knowledge of translational language. This study also offers some practical as well as pedagogical insights into communication issues in business English and business translation. Linguistic Differences Between Translated and Non-Translated English Chairman's StatementsThe chairman's statement is a report within a company's annual report where the chairman summarizes how the company performed in the previous year. It is a crucial document that shareholders, investors, and stakeholders pay close attention to. Our study compared chairman's statements from companies in China, Hong Kong, and the United States. We found that Chinese chairman's statements tend to contain more information and rely less on the context compared to statements from American and Hong Kong companies. We also noticed that the language used in these statements is quite different, which may be attributed to cultural disparities and translation challenges. These findings help us understand how chairman's statements are written and how translation affects them. Additionally, they have practical implications for improving business communication and translation practices.
