In the globalized labor market, skills gaps between industry expectations and university preparation are becoming more prevalent. English communication skills (ECS) are vital soft skills in all workplaces, particularly in international business, where English is commonly used as a lingua franca. This case study examined the nexus between academia…

This article discusses interdisciplinary approaches to help students overcome communication barriers by integrating performing arts in Business Communication courses. Companies emphasize a workforce with solid soft skills to succeed. International Business employs English; thus, practical communication skills in English provide access to jobs in…

Research that considers the relevant temporal, spatial, and societal contexts of a corporate language policy remains scarce to date within the field of sociolinguistics. In contrast to approaches that take companies as static entities, this article focuses on a Belgian multinational corporation over the course of over 20 years and contextualizes…

Globalisation poses a challenge for businesses with linguistically diverse staff, prompting the choice of English as the default corporate language. Although many studies extensively explored the role of corporate language policy in large corporations, employees' perceptions of such policy has not been explored adequately. Fewer studies…

Laughter is a common feature found in daily conversations as an element showing amusement. However, laughter can also appear in serious talk such as business meetings (Murata, 2007; Markaki, et al., 2010). This paper scrutinizes laughter use between Thai and Burmese participants in a business meeting held in Yangon, Myanmar, and examines laughter…

An increasing number of multilingual organisations such as multinational corporations (MNCs) choose to address linguistic diversity through corporate language policies, for example by adopting a common corporate language. Although a common corporate language may improve efficiency of communication at the front-line level, previous research has…

The scope of this article is twofold: to revisit the foundational importance of Business Spanish to the United States and to track its early formalization in American secondary and higher education. It will focus on the years surrounding American Independence in 1776, followed by the key role played by the American Association of Teachers of…

Conceptual understanding is important for professionals because a broad and deep synthesis of knowledge enables flexible and original thinking in complex problem solving. However, little is known about the appearance of conceptual understanding at the student level. This article therefore investigates the appearance of conceptual understanding in…

The ability to copy in relevant stakeholders has rendered the business email a useful tool for managing interpersonal relations and operational matters. However, CCing in business email has remained vastly under-researched in workplace discourse literature, a gap this article seeks to address. We explore the functions of CCing in workplace emails…

This paper examines a remarkable artifact of international business education, a four-book business Chinese language series published in Shanghai from 1916 to 1933 by a Japanese business school. Language-centered business education, they concluded, could break Japanese dependence on intermediaries and provide a significant competitive advantage…

This paper examines the employment of pragmatic empathy as a grand strategy in business letter writing. To account for the realization of pragmatic empathy in business letters, we make a corpus-based manual analysis of four types of business letters. It is found that (1) the choice of deixis is a major concern in most letters: while second person…

This study presents a course design that integrates multimodal sounds, pictures, videos, student presentations, guest speakers, and group work into a multimodal course to enhance intercultural communication competence into a high-profile business training course. The course is tailor-made for 488 managers and staff in one of the world's top 10…

In the highly multicultural workplace of today's multinational corporations (MNCs), translating across different cultures becomes a crucial issue. But what precisely counts as culture in the global workplace of the MNC? What does it exactly mean to be able to translate across cultures under the regimes of evaluation adopted by MNCs? In this…

This essay explores Italian mercantile perceptions of the non-western Mediterranean world during the late Middle Ages. In particular, it analyzes the corpus of merchant manuals known as "pratiche della mercatura" and argues that the intercultural and cross-confessional material included in these handbooks were vital components that…

Under the influence of economic globalization, Chinese enterprises are seeking more international market shares, and Africa is one of their crucial markets. This calls for translators who are experienced in multilingual business communication, which brings a challenge for business translation education in Chinese universities. In this paper, a…