In the highly multicultural workplace of today’s multinational corporations (MNCs), translating across different cultures becomes a crucial issue. But what precisely counts as culture in the global workplace of the MNC? What does it exactly mean to be able to translate across cultures under the regimes of evaluation adopted by MNCs? In this article, I consider these questions through a discussion of the corporate discourse of diversity management, in which the cultural diversity of the workforce is understood as a resource for maximizing profit. Based on a critical review of diversity management literature and a study on Korean managers working for non-Korean MNCs in Singapore, I first show how diversity management’s claim of openness and inclusivity actually works to reproduce unequal relations in the workplace. I then argue that attention to the politics of translation, where the ideological nature of evaluations of cultural (in)commensurability is highlighted, is needed for applied linguists’ engagement with language and communication in the multicultural workplace.

中文翻译：

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在全球工作场所翻译文化：语言、沟通和多样性管理

在当今跨国公司 (MNC) 高度多元文化的工作场所中，跨不同文化的翻译成为一个关键问题。但究竟什么才是跨国公司全球工作场所的文化呢？能够在跨国公司采用的评估制度下进行跨文化翻译究竟意味着什么？在本文中，我通过讨论多元化管理的企业话语来考虑这些问题，其中劳动力的文化多样性被理解为最大化利润的资源。基于对多元化管理文献的批判性回顾和对在新加坡为非韩国跨国公司工作的韩国经理的研究，我首先展示了多元化管理的开放性和包容性主张实际上如何在工作场所重现不平等关系。