CAGLIARI
The unit aims to investigate the financial disclosure practices of some Italian listed companies in the energy sector (e.g., Saras S.p.a., Eni, Edison, Falck Renewables). The focus will be on the relationship between the companies and their actual and potential stakeholders, namely on documents such as financial press releases and reports, presentations, corporate governance reports, annual reports, but also by-laws, codes of ethics, documents relating to sustainability, environment and social responsibility. These multimodal, intertextual and interdiscursive texts aim to improve the company’s communication practices in terms of transparency, credibility and trust, social responsibility and ethics, identity and reputation construction. The analysis will be carried out both synchronically and diachronically on a 2005-2020 corpus. The texts will be investigated, both qualitatively and quantitatively, in terms of their formal and functional aspects, genre features and as social and professional practices. The participants’ identities and relationships will be taken into consideration, as well as the channels of communication, the new digital affordances and how financial and pandemic crises have influenced the company’s financial linguistic strategies. The presence of documents translated into English for an international reader allow an expanded analysis of 1) social practices and transparency by investigating the notion of translation ethics, which is receiving increasing attention in Translation Studies and 2) the translator’s (in)visibility and agency in financial disclosures.
MODENA
The unit will focus on transparency in the world of transport, with a view to safety and environmental impact. These issues have come to the forefront of the current debate due to trends in industries such as airlines where booming travel demand led to the birth of low-cost carriers, and automobiles where electric and digital transformation is underway. As a highly regulated sector, safety and environmental issues concern not only transport services and industrial production, but also the institutions involved in air, rail and road transport. Sustainable mobility is central to the European green deal, aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 90% in 2050. Yet emissions are still a key unresolved issue of the Paris Agreement. The unit will investigate the impact of calls for transparency in corporate and institutional communications by analyzing corpora of disclosure genres collected from transportation companies’ websites (e.g. annual reports, CSR/sustainability reports, integrated reports, codes of ethics, news releases), paying particular attention to the variation between traditional .pdf formats and their more interactive e-paper versions. A corpus will also be built from the websites of European agencies (e.g. European Aviation Safety Agency EASA), including publications (e.g. safety reports, brochures) and other communications through the media or directly to the public (e.g. newsletters, website information). The analysis will explore how transparency emerges in structural, linguistic and multimodal characteristics in
terms of: a) tension between vagueness/ambiguity and precision/clarity; b) types of explanations and forms of “easyfication”. The analysis of best practices could also lead to drafting a set of “maxims” for transparent communication.
CALABRIA
The unit will investigate how transparency emerges in the disclosure practices of globally influential fashion entities, representing a discourse community that reaches across spheres of operation and communicative settings. On the corporate level, the fashion sector contributes significantly to world exports and employs millions of people. Thus, transparency remains an ongoing concern relating to financial aspects but also to social issues, such as the environment, work conditions, diversity, and animal welfare, as highlighted in the Fashion Transparency Index 2020. Starting from established fashion brand databases, a corpus reflecting disclosure practices of leading international brands will be compiled (e.g. annual reports, earnings presentations, CSR reports) across timeframes for diachronic insights into how such texts are evolving to satisfy an increasing demand for transparency among stakeholders and the general public, with particular attention to the use of innovative digital affordances. The linguistic, discursive, pragmatic, intercultural, and multimodal features of the corpus will be analyzed to explore their role in communicating an image of transparency. On an institutional level, a complementary corpus containing transparency-related texts (e.g. diversity/inclusion reports, sustainability statements) of global fashion media companies will also be compiled and analyzed. Indeed, fashion media have a vital function within the discourse community, given the aesthetic and innovative nature of the fashion product. This will enable comparative insights between corporate and institutional actors in the fashion sector.
ROME
Starting from the assumption that transparency is not simply the degree of openness used to convey information, but a semiotic construct exploited for its effective release, the unit will investigate this concept from multiple perspectives in a sector that is keenly aware of the need to promote a transparent image, namely, health and medicine. The analysis will be based on corpora representing genres used by corporate and institutional actors operating in health and medicine, with a view to evaluating how they communicate and claim transparency of disclosure. Documents published on the websites of pharmaceutical companies (e.g., annual reports, press releases) will be explored to determine their distinguishing linguistic, discursive and multimodal features, but also to discover if, when, and how it is lawful to actually disclose or withhold important information. On the institutional level, the analysis will focus on detecting the most salient communicative features that characterise the level of transparency in 1) testimonies of patients affected by rare diseases collected by non-governmental patient-driven organisations and made available to a large public and 2) verbal and written communiqués featuring prominent figures within the present-day medical domain. Given that such disclosure-oriented communications are commonly issued in English regardless of their place of production, the unit will also adopt an intercultural perspective that should yield important insights into the role of English in medical and health disclosure practices.
VERONA
The unit will focus on transparency in (supra)national institutional spoken communicative events aimed at the general public; attention will be dedicated to the topics of medicine, transport, energy, and fashion in line with the other project units, as well as the environment and politics, where disclosure and dissemination practices are particularly at stake. Indeed, institutions design norms and regulations that citizens need to follow, and language represents their primary instrument. Transparency is thus crucial to build trust and create a positive image, as well as foster a positive relationship with the public. Authorities and institutions may prevent misunderstanding and tension thanks to attentive use of linguistic communicative strategies, especially in today’s networked society with immediate access to online information, which may breed mistrust. To shed light on which linguistic, pragmatic, intercultural and nonverbal features enhance or hinder transparency in communication to the general public, the unit will compile a corpus of spoken discourse, including interviews, Q&A sessions, dialogues, and broadcast debates sourced from major broadcasting companies and content-sharing platforms. These will involve diplomats, ambassadors, politicians and international operators from different linguacultural backgrounds, who interact in English as their working language, thus adding an intercultural layer to the analysis. The data gleaned from the corpus will also underpin further analysis from a didactic viewpoint, aimed at developing materials for use in a task-based pedagogical framework for English Language Teaching, and designed to mold learners’ receptive/productive skills required to access and comprehend the features of transparency in spoken broadcasts and to communicate effectively with transparency in mind.