Earticle

This study investigates the effect of translator's education backgrounds on the readability of CEO greetings translations posted on corporate websites. While most studies on business information readability focus on the relationship between firm-specific characteristics and readability, relatively little work has examined effects of CEO-specific characteristics on business information readability. This paper focuses on CEO greetings considering their importance as a business information channel. This study hypothesizes that readability of CEO greetings translated or approved by CEOs with graduate education and/or overseas education is different from that by CEOs without such backgrounds. Univariate analyses show that readability of greetings on corporate websites by the two groups of CEOs is not different from each other. But overseas education is more likely to influence positively the readability of target-text CEO greetings than is graduate education. Additional tests, however, show that CEOs without overseas education are more likely to write more readable source-text CEO greetings than do their counterparts who have studied abroad. (160 words)