Abstract

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Research problem:</i></b> Taking a linguistic complexity approach, this study conducted a comparative analysis of the readability of English-language CEO statements in Chinese and American corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Research question:</i></b> From a linguistic complexity perspective, are there significant differences in the readability of CEO statements between original American CSR reports and English translations of Chinese CSR reports? If so, what are the lexical, syntactic, and cohesive differences between them? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Literature review:</i></b> Previous studies of CSR reports’ readability primarily employed classic formula-based readability measures, but a systematic analysis from a linguistic complexity perspective is lacking. Scholarly attention to the readability of translated CSR reports is also scant. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Methodology:</i></b> This study collected English-language CEO statements from the CSR reports of American and Chinese top companies and then applied the TAALED and TAALES computational linguistic tools to calculate the lexical complexity, L2SCA to measure the syntactic complexity, and TAACO to gauge the cohesive complexity. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Results:</i></b> The results show that there are considerable linguistic variations between the American and Chinese companies’ reports in terms of lexical, syntactic, and cohesive complexity. The CSR reports produced by Chinese firms are generally less readable than those created by American companies. Specifically, they are characterized by higher informational density, more sophisticated words, longer syntactic length, more coordinate phrases, and more complex nominals, as well as fewer connectives, pronouns, and demonstratives. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Conclusion:</i></b> Our findings enrich the present understanding of the readability of CSR reports and communication through a quantitative linguistic lens, and provide practical insights for the CSR communication of firms from non-English-speaking countries in the context of internationalization.