Dissemination of Corporate Web Information in Spanish: The Case of the US Healthcare Sector

Abstract

In the business context, to achieve international projection, the use of several languages is essential. The healthcare sector is not an exception, as it is a remarkable domain of specialization. So, the analysis of the keys to corporate language management—considered as the application of communicative management strategies regarding business internationalization processes—on the Web is fundamental. The main objective of this work is to identify the main features that multilingual corporate Web communication presents, specifically in the English > Spanish language combination. To this end, a sample of corporate Web sites of US companies in the healthcare sector extracted from the Fortune 500 ranking, published annually by Fortune magazine, is analyzed. A statistical analysis of frequencies and correlations has been carried out. Results show that 58.3% of the Web sites studied have undergone some kind of linguistic management processes from a multilingual perspective. In addition, Spanish language occupies a prominent role in the processes of corporate Web information dissemination. The data obtained seem to indicate that healthcare US corporations tend to make considerable efforts to disseminate their Web information in a wide range of languages. This endeavor seems to increase in the case of Spanish language. However, these efforts are still limited.