| Abstract [eng] |
The case study provides an insight into the way in which McDonald’s corporation localize their internationalized American website for France and Lithuania regarding local cultural, sociological and historical context by employing multimodal elements. Anchored in the methodology of multimodal discourse analysis and genre and multimodality model, the research focuses on the contribution of multimodal elements – images, text, color, typography and layout – to the fulfillment of set purposes, namely to advertise McDonald’s production, to offer a user new brand image and to find new employers for company’s restaurants. The corpus analyzed is a multimodal corpus that includes multimodal elements found on McDonald’s websites designed for American, French and Lithuanian markets. The multimodal corpus not only provides material for a case study of this web genre, but also enables a cross-cultural comparison to be made that can reveal important differences and similarities between three localized products and locales. The aim of the research is to evaluate the qualitative features following the localization and multimodality theories. Given the difference in size of three different locales a hypothesis is formulated that the website localized for Lithuanian market is of worse quality in localization sense than websites adapted for USA and France. The contrastive analysis revealed differences both in purposes, potential users and rendering of website content between the American, French and Lithuanian multimodal corpora suggesting the relevance of the social and cultural contexts for the realization and the establishment of localized websites. The localization of websites also seems to be linked with specific internet genre features. The quality evaluation showed that the American McDonald’s website is of better quality than French and Lithuanian ones. |
