How do university museums communicate online? Intercultural perspectives on museum discourse

This volume investigates how European university museums communicate in English on their websites. The research explores the extent to which the production of institutional web texts in English is informed by an audience-oriented approach, and more specifically by the awareness of the need to address readers with different cultural backgrounds and different linguistic needs. A combination of two different perspectives – one focusing on the final textual products and the other examining the processes behind the museums’ communicative practices – provides the methodological framework for this interdisciplinary research. First, a survey of English-version websites of European university museums was carried out to assess the extent to which the latter produce content in English on their websites. This survey informed the construction of a corpus including a selection of informative and promotional web pages in English from European university museums’ websites. The corpus involves two different contexts: one where English is spoken as an official language and another, more diversified one where English is used as an international language. The text analysis focused on the extent to which texts comply with web writing guidelines and establish a relationship with their intended readers through stance and engagement features. Finally, individual qualitative semi-structured interviews with museum staff from a subset of museums were conducted. These shed light on the processes underpinning the creation of museum web contents in English and the intended audience for whom such contents are produced. The results of the survey suggested that university museums in Europe tend to provide an English-version website, especially in countries where Germanic or Ugro-Finnic languages are spoken. In turn, the text analyses only partially showed an audience-oriented approach to communication: in particular, university museums in the UK seemed to be more committed to it than university museums in other countries by structuring texts for readability, establishing textual authority and creating engagement with readers. Finally, insights from the interviews revealed that the production of texts in English does not seem to be informed by the idea of a specific intended audience, and even less so a linguistically diverse audience: textual strategies seem to be limited to the use of a generally clear, simple language, which is supposed to be appropriate for all readers, regardless of their cultural and linguistic background. These results contribute to current research on the conceptualisation of museum audiences, the processes underpinning museum discourse, the museums’ communicative practices addressed to a culturally diversified audience and the use of English as an international language on institutional websites. This research stresses the need for an interdisciplinary exchange between museum and heritage studies on the one hand and linguistics, translation and intercultural studies on the other hand.