Tourism Discourse: Strategies and Difficulties in Translating Hotel Websites

Abstract

The article presents an analysis of one of the most dynamically growing spheres of translation – translation in tourism, namely localization of hotel websites. Undoubtedly, the Internet is the main source of information retrieval and a tool enhancing tourism attractiveness of a destination, which means that while translating hotel websites one should pay great attention to the language content. The analysis conducted by the authors allows concluding that most of the translations feature a lot of language mistakes: from lexical incongruity to spelling, making translated texts unreadable and not corresponding to their communicative and pragmatic functions. If a translator holds a basic strategy of producing a new text using peculiar stylistic markers and figurative language, characterizing other linguistic culture, and sometimes changes the form and structure of the text in the source language, then the translated text functions as an element, attracting new customers. This situation reflects the existence of highly widespread problems, found in the sphere of translation: the growing number of people speaking foreign languages makes professional competences of translators worthless. Together with the expansion of Machine Translation it lowers the quality of a "ready" product – localized text – making recipients and senders to perceive the inferior language content as normal.

Keywords

• translation
• tourism
• attractiveness
• website localization
• pragmatic adaptation
• linguistic culture
• professional competence
• language norm