Standardization or Adaptation? A Critical Comparison of the Italian and English Website of La Consorteria 1966

The international promotion of local food products increasingly depends on the ability of digital communication to make culturally specific meanings intelligible beyond their original context. This dynamic is especially critical for origin-linked products, whose intrinsic value integrates material quality, commercial descriptions, and a rich combination of territory, institutional certification, production knowledge, heritage, and sensory experience. Against this backdrop, this dissertation investigates the cross-cultural web localization of the La Consorteria 1966 e-commerce platform, devoted to Traditional Balsamic Vinegar of Modena PDO and Balsamic Vinegar of Modena PGI, by analyzing its Italian source and English target versions. The core objective is to determinate how balsamic vinegar is framed as an authentic, certified and territorially anchored product and how this narrative is strategically reconfigured for an international audience. The analysis explores how product-related meanings are reorganized for readers who may not share familiarity with Modena, Italian geographical indications or cultural framework surrounding balsamic vinegar. Accordingly, the study maps the relationship between perceived product value, corporate credibility, territorial identity, and reader orientation. Methodologically, the research draws upon a purposive corpus of five paired webpages selected from the official La Consorteria 1966 website representing the platform’s major communicative functions: institutional self-presentation, explanatory discourse, product browsing, and individual product promotion. The comparative framework integrates discourse-pragmatics, web localization theory, and multimodal analysis. This is operationalized via a coding grid designed to identify recurrent localization patterns, such as omission, addition, explicitation, neutralization, reframing, and terminological shifts. Findings indicate a substantial macro-structural continuity in the English version, in which the main page functions and the central role of heritage, certification, expertise, and territorial identity are preserved. However, the target text transcends the mere linguistic replica. Through targeted terminological adaptation (e.g., DOP/IGP rendered as PDO/PGI), strategic explicitation, partial neutralization, and the recalibration of reader-oriented markers, the localized version actively reshapes the source content for an international audience. These shifts position the international reader as a user requiring guided navigation through a highly specialized cultural and institutional domain. Ultimately, the dissertation argues that the English localization of the platform represents a careful negotiation between cooperative accessibility and territorial identity. By mediating culturally dense narratives, the localized version enhances global accessibility while preserving the markers of origin, expertise, and heritage that underpin the product's symbolic and commercial value.