A cultural conceptual, model-based analysis of web translation in tourism

Abstract

Tourism web translation, as part of the commercial translation sector, has gained special attention in recent years, which is all thanks to globalization. Today, in just one click of a button on a tourism website, the tourists can plan and as well as decide on their next tourist destination. However, there appears to be limited study with the focus on cultural conceptualization and how it relates to the translation of tourism websites. In this regard, this study is aimed at analyzing the translation of a tourism website, using the Cultural Conceptual Translation Model (CCT). Two sets of corpora are used in the analysis of this study. The first set refers to the English and Arabic versions that were taken from the "Visit Saudi tourism website"(https://www.visitsaudi.com/en/). The second set of corpora refers to other English and Arabic parallel texts that were taken from commercial websites. A qualitative research methodology is conducted through a multiple choice and open-ended questions survey. Twenty-five participants responded to the survey, nine English nativespeakers and sixteen Arabic native-speakers. An extra-textual analysis was carried out on the VisitSaudi.com and parallel-text corpus. Based on the extra-textual analysis, relevant cultural dimensions particularly religious beliefs, individualism vs. collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, indulgence vs. restraint, high vs. low context communication, orality vs. literacy were recognized. The cultural dimensions are discussed in relation to the destination themes, naturescapes and adventurescapes, and how these themes are presented by the website, stylescapes. Findings revealed that identification of the cultural dimensions is essential for the translation of style and content related to the tourism destination themes as it preserves the function of Tourism Promotional Materials (TPMs) by fulfilling the target audience's expectations. We also found that TPMs in a digitized medium tend to be localized more than translated, making them more accessible to different audiences with different cultural conceptualizations, expectations and motives.