A Comparative Study on the Intercultural Adaptation of Chinese Companies’ British Websites

Abstract

The cultural values of a company’s websites tend to converge with those of its own country, but overseas users have a local preference for them, which requires the company to adjust them according to the target countries’ culture. However, few previous studies have investigated the intercultural communication of Chinese companies’ overseas websites. Therefore, the current study investigates how and why Chinese companies adapt their British websites to the British culture by making a quantitative and qualitative comparative analysis of British local websites’, Chinese local websites’ and British websites’ cultural values in the five cultural dimensions of individualism, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, power distance and harmony based on a complementary cultural typology drawn from Hofstede’s and Schwartz’s theories. It is found that Chinese enterprises with little awareness of overseas websites’ intercultural adaptation, deeply influenced by Chinese culture of collectivism and low harmony, have successfully adjust their British websites only in the dimensions of masculinity, uncertainty avoidance and power distance, but fail to adjust them successfully in the dimensions of individualism and harmony.