Localizzazione di contenuti web tra standardizzazione e adattamento RITT Rivista internazionale di tecnica della traduzione = International Journal of Translation

This paper aims to investigate website localisation practices in the Italian/German language-culture pair. A corpus containing the About us pages of 49 websites of large German companies and their localised version for the Italian market was compiled for this purpose. An in-depth investigation of the content of the two subcorpora and a macro- and microstructural analysis of the websites in their entirety allowed the main localisation strategies to be identified. This process also shed light on the relationship between standardisation and cultural adaptation, two tendencies that coexist to varying degrees in every localised website. Through a series of qualitative analyses, this study reveals certain elements that do not seem to be subject to any effort to localise (e.g. textual function or the most common About us page themes), thus confirming the hypothesis that localising a website does not necessarily mean rewriting it from scratch for the target market, but rather adapting only those aspects that need to be adapted