Even though today most companies have websites, by the end of the 20th century not all companies could be found on the web. Online booking, weather forecasting and interactive maps are only some of the innovations that have been introduced by some European railway companies as part of their policy to attract new customers and outfox the competition. The three aspects that prove to be the most crucial in describing the language on the websites are: the structure of the website, the type of content found on it, and the target country or area of the website. By delimiting the geographic areas and what their role is in choosing the target audience of the websites and pages, a classification has been made in order to distinguish between international, local and domestic websites. There were clear differences between these in terms of the content and language choices of the analyzed websites. Only customers in their home country can benefit from the wide range of services offered by the website of a particular railway company. These domestic websites are usually in the official language of the country and contain more documents than other websites owned by the company. In some cases they are translated into other languages, like for example, a French to English Translator translated these web pages into English but in his translation he omitted any local and domestic information.
Websites that railway companies have for other countries where they operate are called local websites but they are different from domestic websites because their content and language selections seem to be different. The beneficiaries of the information offered in the local websites may be prospective or current residents or just travelers. Only in a small number of cases is the website designed to serve incoming travelers, not local customers, though both aspects appear in the content of the particular website. In addition to the local and regional pages or websites, companies often have an international page or a separate website which contains material that is relevant to all countries and the only local references are the links to the local sites. For example, a number of countries of the Middle East have used a Italian Translator for their websites in order to make them accessible to wider range of international customers. What the international website may function as is to redirect customers or simply to welcome them and show them the way to the local pages.
One of the features that make websites unique is that some of the content is presented through the language of the target country, though a number of links redirect to an international page. According to some sources a website is defined as a group of web pages created by a certain organization that deal with a certain subject. This definition provokes us to talk about the Russian company Artemis’ website, which is designed so that we can select our country when we enter their international home page. In order to achieve this the company hired a Russian to English Translator, who was assigned to translate all the necessary texts, entering their home page from our country, will not necessarily redirect us to the local websites. Speaking about the content of the websites we can make the following division: decentralized and centralized depending on the customers and their needs.
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