Online Promotion of Private Hospital Promoting Medical Tourism: A Multimodal Analysis from A Cultural Perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 208-230
Author(s):  
Wan Fatimah Solihah Wan Abdul Halim ◽  
◽  
Intan Safinaz Zainudin ◽  
Nor Fariza Mohd Nor ◽  
◽  
...  

The medical tourism industry, which was seriously affected by the coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19), needs to give attention to its online promotional message strategy to boost the industry. Cultural variability is also crucial since the market for the medical tourism industry is global. However, studies involving cultural variability have only focused on examining single discourse mode, mainly the linguistic mode and overlooked the multimodal perspective. This study, therefore, examined the way in which the Prince Court Medical Centre (PCMC), a private hospital in Malaysia is presented and how the various modes in the hospital's website are combined to deliver promotional messages to international medical tourists. A total of three web pages from the website of PCMC were analysed using the Systemic Functional Theory framework. This study employed Halliday’s metafunction theory (for language analysis and Kress and van Leeuwen’s model for image analysis. The ways in which the multimodal features of the website reflect communicative style from the cultural perspective were also explored. Hall’s (2000) cultural dimension of context dependency which classifies cultures into high-context and low-context cultures was used to present the analysis. The findings revealed that PCMC’s hospital website has elements that are mainly encountered in low-context cultures such as elaborated code systems as well as direct, explicit, and highly structured messages. The findings help create awareness of communicative strategies in designing medical tourism websites that involve meaning making through texts and images and the possible cultural interpretation especially among copywriters, website designers or medical tourism stakeholders. Keywords: Multimodal analysis, systemic functional theory (SFT), cultural context dimension, online promotional discourse, medical tourism.

Author(s):  
Yuhong Yang

Abstract Television interpreting, although serving the largest population of users, is underexplored compared with conference interpreting or community interpreting by the academic community, not to mention any systematic, in-depth analysis foregrounding or tailored to its salient multimodal features. Drawing on Kress and van Leeuwen’s multimodal social-semiotic theory of communication as well as frameworks established in nonverbal communication and audiovisual translation, this paper moves away from traditional language-based discussions of interpreter-mediated television events and attempts to gain new insights into this essentially multimodal communicative practice through multimodal analysis of data. This paper purports to testify a tentative framework of modal relations of “complementarity”, “dependency”, and “incongruity” which are at work in interpreted television events, with authentic data, amounting to a total length of 5 hours, recorded from live news programmes on Chinese TV. The findings of modal complementarity and dependency clearly point to the essentially multimodal meaning making mechanism involved in the semiotic ensemble that is to be perceived by the audience in a gestalt fashion, which reveals the inadequacy of linguistic approaches to television interpreting.


Author(s):  
Ajay Kumar Dogra ◽  
Pooja Dogra

The health tourism Industry is witnessing a sudden paradigm shift in last five years. India has become a home of traditional medicine that has been practiced for several thousand years as a part of manav dharma to give relief to the needy and mostly free of cost. With modern diagnostic and treatment facilities, experienced surgeons, one of the largest pharmaceutical industries in world, and a tradition of caring, India provides world class surgical and healthcare facilities, with comparable success rates and prompt service levels. The potential of medical tourism is such that it can even surpass the revenue earned from IT sector. Recognizing the pivotal contribution of medical tourism to the economic development, the Indian Government has initiated numerous measures to promote this vary young industry to attract international tourism. This has motivated to identify recent trends and opportunities in India for the medical and healthcare tourism, and to explore the critical factors which can lead to success of initiatives taken by ministry of tourism for the development of medical tourism in India. Finally paper suggests measures to enhance medical tourism in the country.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (5) ◽  
pp. 5-10
Author(s):  
Rajat Shandilya ◽  
◽  
Bhagyesh Acharya ◽  
Mayank ◽  
Monika Garg ◽  
...  

India is quickly becoming one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world. The rise of India as a tourist destination can be attributed to a number of factors. The growth of medical tourism in India is one of the reasons examined in this paper. Healthcare tourism is when people from all over the world fly to another country to receive medical, dental, and surgical treatment when exploring, vacationing, and completely immersing themselves in the attractions of the countries they are visiting. In the medical tourism industry, India is one of the most popular destinations. Medical tourism is experiencing rapid growth in India. Medical tourists cross foreign boundaries in search of medical care. Medical tourism has developed to become a multibillion-dollar industry. It is important to remember that the primary goal of medical tourists is to provide high-quality medical care at an affordable cost. When compared to other developing countries in the world, India has emerged as the most sought-after destination for medical tourists due to the availability of world-class doctors at affordable prices. In addition, India has a wide range of tourist destinations. It has tremendous potential for creating jobs and earning large sums of foreign currency. The paper ends with policy recommendations for advancing the rapidly growing medical tourism industry.


Introduction. Health tourism is considered a kind of tourism which is carried out for the purpose of prevention of various diseases and the recreation and provides for guests accommodation in sanatorium-and-spa establishments. This is a special form of tourism, which includes providing medical treatment (often non-drug) or health improvement services. Problem formulation. Health tourism takes one of the leading places in the tourism industry. This is mostly caused by the increase in the population wellbeing. Analysis of recent research and publications. Studies of the development of health tourism in general and in the Lviv region in particular are presented in the works of many Ukrainian and foreign scientists. The article fulfilled the analysis of foreign and domestic sources, which allowed to identify the following ideas that are of interest for the study of health tourism in Lviv region and many other regions of Ukraine Highlighting previously unsolved parts of the overall problem. The fulfilled study allowed us to assess approaches to the analysis of the current state of health tourism in general and in the Lviv region in particular. The literature is dominated by the opinion that the resort sphere of Lviv region attracts tourists with both favorable prices and a wide range of available services. The issues of estimating the tourist flows coming into the territory of Lviv region were also considered. At the same time, insufficient attention was paid to the study of the status of medical tourism, to the substantiation of proposals aimed at optimizing the development and the improvement of functioning of spa resorts in Lviv region. Formulating the purpose of the paper. The focus of this paper will be set on an objective assessment of the current conditions of the tourism industry based on a quantitative analysis of available statistical data with cartographic and modern statistical methods. Presentation of the main research material. The main directions of formation and development of health tourism in the world are outlined. Cheap health care and leisure services are provided mainly in the resorts of Asia, Latin America and Australia, as well as in some European countries. This is due to the cost of labor, as well as global pricing mechanisms. The main stages in the development of health tourism in Lviv region are distinguished. The description of Lviv region as an arena for the development of health tourism is given. Spa resorts of Lviv region are attractive first of all by the prices, and also by the wide range of available services. The resort sphere of Lviv region has been studied. Tourist flows in the region are being characterized. Conclusions. The main means of popularizing spa resorts of Lviv region have been identified, including advertising, Internet sources, exhibitions, forums and conferences. The proposals have been worked out directed on optimization of development and improvement of functioning of spa resorts of the Lviv region.


2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-85
Author(s):  
Thusha Devi Rajendra ◽  
Surinderpal Kaur

This study is based on the multimodal analysis of two children’s concrete poems from the poetry book, Splish Splash (1994) by Joan Bransfield Graham. It employs Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) Visual Grammar as the analytical tool to analyse the visuals in terms of compositional meaning. It investigates how visual elements (words and images) are represented in the poems. In addition, it focuses on the features of the images and how they cohere on a page. The findings suggest that the representations of images in the poems reproduce the dominant theme of water and its forms. Furthermore, the interrelated-systems of salience and framing are used extensively and they contribute to meaning-making. Words and images support each other and coexist to provide meanings in the poems. Therefore, the combination of words and images creates a meaningful whole and offers readers greater opportunities to create meanings.


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