Addressing Translation Issues as Intercultural Communication Barriers in Tourism

This chapter examines Chinese-English translation issues that cause intercultural communication misunderstanding in the tourism language. As international tourists are travelling around China, Chinese-English translation services are useful. It plays an important role in facilitating the tourism business operations and meeting the tourist language needs. However, failure to understand cultural differences can result in intercultural communication failure in tourism discourse. The researcher critically analysed the English-Chinese translation issues using tourist information texts collected from a variety of written sources and examining them at cross-lingua-cultural communication level. Translation of tourist information texts from a source language to a target language is more than a linguistic transfer and involves linguistic restructure and cultural imaging re-creation that make sense in a target language and culture. Implications for addressing translation issues as intercultural communication barriers are discussed. Future research direction is also indicated in the conclusion.

A Genre-Register Analysis of a Tourism Brochure Written by Students in an EMI University Context

Research conducted at university level reveals that students usually have difficulties in performing cognitive and discursive operations involved in the production of academic and specialized texts, which aggravate when these activities are developed in non-native language. The purpose of this chapter is to analyze a tourism brochure written by students in an English-Medium Instruction (EMI) higher education context from a combined genre-register approach. Particularly, it aims to examine the students' main strengths and weaknesses when writing this particular text genre. A compilation of 37 tourism brochures written in English by Spanish university students is analyzed qualitatively according to an analytic rating scale inspired by Friedl and Auer (2007). Results show that students perform better in terms of register, whereas significant deficiencies regarding genre and discourse are found. This reveals that explicit teaching of discourse and genre issues in university classrooms is necessary in order to help students produce higher-quality specialized texts.

Teaching the Sociolinguistics of Tourism

In the spring semester of 2012 the author taught a new course in the graduate program in linguistics at a comprehensive state university in a large American metropolis: Language and Tourism. For the first time in at this university, a graduate course focusing solely on the analysis of tourism materials, e.g. official tourism websites, travel programs, brochures, etc., was offered as an elective to students who had taken a sociolinguistics course without such a narrow focus. Thirteen students pursuing their Master of Arts (MA) degrees – twelve in the MA Program in Linguistics and one in the MA Program in Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) – enrolled in and successfully completed this course. This chapter, which provides an overview of a graduate level linguistics course in Language and Tourism based on the author's critical reflections on teaching (Brookfield, 2017), offers suggestions for how sociolinguistic concepts can be taught through the study of tourism and encourages more linguistic-based research in the instruction of tourism studies.

Localization of Tourism Destinations' Websites

The globalization of the tourism industry has been made possible thanks to ICTs. From a communication viewpoint, Internet does not know political borders, but still experiences linguistic and cultural ones. This situation requires that publishers provide both a linguistic and a cultural translation of their messages. Only caring for such a comprehensive “localization” will ensure being understandable and attractive for people with different cultural backgrounds. The chapter analyzes (1) the reasons why localization in tourism online communication is needed (with a focus on tourism destinations and cultural tourism); (2) the main needed activities to provide it. It also discusses (3) different practices and strategies (presenting a few cases), as well as (4) the issue of how much localization is needed, and when it may become counter-productive, making the destination too much similar to one's own experience at home.

Different Ways of Cycling?

The study aims at comparing the ways in which different cultures perceive the experience of cycling holidays by analysing texts that promote this kind of tourism, i.e., website texts produced in three linguistic and cultural realities: Germany, Italy, and The Netherlands. The underlying assumption is that promotional tourism texts are influenced by the cultural peculiarities of their target groups: in order to produce functionally effective texts, authors must take into account their readers' attitudes and expectations towards a specific destination or – as in this case – a specific activity. The comparison focuses on the different profiles of potential clients addressed by the texts and on the main topics used as “promotional levers”. Some translations in German and Dutch are then analysed to ascertain whether they reflect the same differences and cultural characteristics found between the original texts. Finally, the benefits of linking Translation Studies and Imagology are briefly discussed.

The Discourse of Tourism from a Systemic Functional Perspective

Tourism has undergone a shift from physical to online. This is obvious even in its promotional materials, as websites are the most usual type of online tourism promotion. The present chapter proposes Systemic Functional Theory for the analysis of websites. It first presents a brief description of the theory of the metafunctions, applied to both language (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) and images (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996). Then, it analyzes two websites in order to show the application of the theory, focusing on language, image and their composition as multimodal acts. The chapter concludes by highlighting practical benefits for web designers, copywriters and/or tourism promoters.

Stereotyping in Tourism Discourse

The aim of the chapter is to present stereotyping as an important discourse strategy and culture-specific linguistic phenomena in tourism advertising discourse. Stereotyping in tourism advertising occurs when the authors of advertisments generalise underlining only those qualities that make a competitive advantage of the advertisied product. Stereotypes therefore play the key role in constituting the identity of tourism product. Besides the tourism product, also the addressee is stereotyped, since the persuasion strategy of the tourism advertising should be adapted to a generalised representation of the specific target audience. In the chapter the stereotyping in the tourism advertising discourse is observed regarding the choice of arguments and modification of their intensity. Further, the intercultural comparison is made between the arguments and their modification in Slovenian and Italian tourism advertising texts. In the final part of the chapter the metaphorization is shown as a discourse strategy complementary to stereotyping.

The Tuscan Paradise in E-Tourism

This chapter studies figurative language in Italian promotional tourism websites and their translations into English. It analyses figures of speech, such as metaphor, hyperbole, metonymy, and personification, within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics (Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Lakoff & Turner 1989; Lakoff 1993; Ruiz de Mendoza 1997; Ruiz de Mendoza & Pérez 2011). The aims of the analysis are, first, to investigate the relevance of figuration in original e-texts which promote Tuscany, and, second, to inspect whether web translators adopt the same strategies to persuade their readers in the English renditions. Results show the importance of figuration across languages and cultures, both for promoters and for translators. However, they also show how translators of promotional tourist texts can 1) omit to render figuration, 2) activate different conceptual mappings between or within new domains when rendering figuration, or 3) introduce new figurative language to increase the text's persuasive effects.

Audience Comments on Digital Travel Videos

This chapter aims to develop an ongoing research on digital travel videos, with an overall aim to offer methodological indications on how to analyze similar online multimodal and multimedia participatory situations. By addressing issues of popularity, response and appraisal, it examined meaning-making performed by text comments posted by YouTubers. Retrieved through the YouTube Comment Scraper software, comments have been inspected in terms of number, language, topic, appraisal, and linguistic features. Overall, instances show positive appraisal and are more focused on the videos, than on the depicted region, and their style epitomizes spontaneous and uncontrolled user-to-user communication within the digital participatory environment. More than for their content, comments seem to offer a relevant contribution to destination image formation, especially, through their presence and form, and from a connotative viewpoint. Alternative to formulaic and vertical tourism communication texts, they connote the destination as open and welcoming, as spontaneous and authentic.

Tourism Promotion and Disability

This study illustrates the preliminary results of a corpus-based analysis aimed at discovering the main linguistic features characterising the promotion of tourism for special-needs travellers. Even if accessible tourism represents an important sector in the market, not only for its social and moral importance but also for its strong economic potential, detailed research on the linguistic properties of tourism for disabled people is still rather limited and mainly tends to focus on the problems of physical access rather than considering the ways to improve its promotional strategies. Through a comparative corpus-based analysis, this paper will investigate the relevant linguistic features of a corpus of promotional materials advertising holidays and tourist services for the disabled, and relate them to the communicative strategies of two other corpora dedicated to the standard and translational language of tourism. The aim of this research is to show how mainstream tourism discourse still considers disability as a taboo topic, mostly ignoring or vaguely mentioning it in the general promotion of tourist destinations. The study will also attempt to suggest new linguistic and social attitudes aimed at stylistically improving and further including the accessible tourism sector within the overall tourism promotion.