From Corporate Social Responsibility Reports to Sustainability Webpages: An Analysis of Convergences and Divergences

The paper reports on the results of a comparative study of two small corpora including the CSR reports and webpages generated by a sample of European companies working in three different sectors (Oil and Gas, Banking, and Food-BeveragesTobacco). In an attempt to analyse the process of intralingual and intersemiotic translation of information from printed into digital materials, the two sets of documents were examined for the kind of information they release, their textual organisation, paratextual elements and linguistic peculiarities. The results suggest that the high information density, preeminence of hard data and focus on performance typical of CSR reports are counterbalanced on the Web by more generic, simplified and grand claims about the companies' long-term commitment to sustainability.