Regular Article
Cultural localisation as a strategy to preserve the persuasive function in the translation of tourism websites from French into English
Tourist promotional texts function like advertising texts in that they aim to “persuade, lure, woo, and seduce”
(Dann 1996). In the context of global marketing, tourists can be considered
consumers who seek to escape from ordinary life carrying their culturally embedded mindsets with them. Although cultural
differences have been widely discussed in the literature on tourism translation, few studies have focused on the deeper level
‘out-of-awareness’ culture through which tourists travelling abroad interpret what they see. This paper investigates cultural
localisation as a strategy to adapt the source text of a French wine tourism website to the hidden cultural values of British
tourists in order to preserve the persuasive function of the target text. Using Hall’s anthropological iceberg model and
Hofstede’s cultural dimensions as the framework, a small sample of French source texts and their English translations are compared
to demonstrate the link between the stylistic features of tourism language and the psychological motivations of tourists,
highlighting the interplay between all levels of the cultural iceberg. The findings suggest that culturally localised tourism
websites are more likely to succeed as instruments of persuasion, with ego-targeting discussed as an effective strategy when
adapting the text to appeal to the British market.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.1Tourism texts
- 1.2The language of tourism
- 2.Culture and marketing approaches to tourism translation
- 3.Building a cultural localisation framework
- 4.The information-to-persuasion ratio in evaluating tourism translation
- 5.Evaluating persuasiveness in VisitFrenchWine
- 5.1Analysis of homepage headline
- 5.2Analysis of ‘Your Experiences’ – Wine-Tasting Workshop at the Cité du Vin
- 5.3Analysis of ‘Your Experiences’ – Urban wine tour of Bordeaux’s wine bars
- 6.Conclusions
- Note
-
References
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