Transcreation, a term merging "translation" and "creation", has become a buzzword in the language service industry as well as in translation studies. However, pertinent questions with regard to it are: "what is transcreation?" and "what kind of text is a transcreated text?" This paper addresses the first issue by a systemic functional linguistics based survey of definitions from professional translators, language service providers and scholars in translation studies respectively for a real definition of transcreation with descriptions of its metafunctions. Further, by textual analysis in the case study of the Chinese and its English translation corporate profiles of Huawei, a multinational information and communication technology company of China, the paper studies the application of transcreation in corporate communication writing by examining its metafunctions. It is concluded that transcreation requires multi-party's interplay and produces new constructs in the transcreated texts, which poses both challenges and opportunities to translators. The research findngs prove transcreation's effectiveness and flexibility in corporate communication and showcase the challenges and opportunities it brings to the translation profession by linking its real definition with its practical use.

The corporate profile translations of multinational corporations (MNCs) in emerging economies such as China possess rich information for narrative analysis. Nevertheless, how the parts of a corporate profile translation form a whole narrative remains undertheorized. This study, therefore, examines the relationality of parts in the corporate profile translations of China’s MNCs by integrating William Labov’s narrative structure with Margaret Somers’ narrative identity theory. Specifically, we conduct a theoretical thematic analysis of how constituents form a whole narrative in relevant corporate profiles, of the shifts in the relationality of parts from the Chinese source texts (STs) to the English target texts (TTs) of these profiles, and of the influences of these shifts on the constitution of corporate identities in the target texts. Our results show that in the corporate profiles of Chinese MNCs, episodes are not randomly selected and related to each other but follow predominant patterns. However, we find no unified patterns in the shifts in the relationality of parts via the corporate profile translation of China’s MNCs. We thus reveal how corporations’ identities are constituted in diverse ways that reflect their fluid and unique features. Accordingly, our findings have implications for translation studies and corporate communications.