What is it about?
Tourists are motivated by the desire to escape from ordinary life, yet many travel abroad carrying the deeply rooted values of their own culture. This paper investigates how the English version of a French wine tourism website can appeal to its target British market by focusing on the cultural values of the tourist rather than those of the destination.
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Why is it important?
Using a framework that applies anthropological and cultural models to tourism language and tourist behaviour, the findings show that culturally localized tourism websites are more likely to succeed as instruments of persuasion. A strategy known as "ego-targeting" is highlighted as particularly effective when adapting French tourism texts to appeal to the British market.
Perspectives
My aim in writing this article was to bring to light the deeper issue of culture in tourism translation, not the exotic culture of the destination but the cultural "baggage" that tourists generally travel with. Based on my own experience as a tourism translator, I was intrigued by what lay behind my own linguistic and textual choices, and I was motivated to explore why some translated tourism texts come across as clumsy, awkward and unappealing, even when they are linguistically immaculate. I hope my article will inspire and support tourism translators working in any language pair where there is a wide gap between the culture of the destination and the culture of the target tourist.
Sally Cowan
London Metropolitan University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Cultural localisation as a strategy to preserve the persuasive function in the translation of tourism websites from French into English, The Journal of Internationalization and Localization, December 2019, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/jial.20001.cow.
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