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Article published In:
Translation Spaces
Vol. 7:2 (2018) ► pp.304–333

“A pretty village is a welcome sight”

A contrastive study of the promotion of physical space in official tourism websites

ORCID logo | University of Birmingham

This paper analyses adjectival descriptions used to frame and promote physical space in tourism texts in English and in Greek, and how any differences are negotiated in translation. A comparison is drawn across three categories of space (human-made, natural, and abstract) to investigate how each locality affects and is affected by linguistic choices. Methodologically, a corpus triangulation approach is employed, combining corpora created from three types of tourism websites: original or non-translated Greek websites; their translations into English; and non-translated websites in English. Results reveal that, while important differences are observed between English and Greek non-translated texts, translations tend to stay very close to their source texts, with small differences observed across the three categories of space. This study contributes to both tourism and translation studies by offering insight into how space is framed across languages, which can inform, and ultimately, transform, translation practice.

Keywords: language of tourism, Greek, corpus triangulation, adjectives, translation
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Language of tourism
    • Physical space
    • The language of euphoria
    • Translation challenges
  • Data and methods
    • Corpus
    • Data extraction
  • Results
    • Nouns and adjectives
    • English vs. Greek
    • Translated vs. non-translated English
    • Source vs. target texts
  • Controlled promotion
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Corpus reference
  • References
Published online: 28 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ts.18019.mal
References (40)

Corpus reference

The corpus under study is composed of 475,577 words extracted from 1,512 texts originating from various tourism websites listed below. It has been compiled and created under the supervision of Dr Sofia Malamatidou, Department of Modern Languages, University of Birmingham. The data has been collected from online sources during the months of June, July and August 2017.[ p.331 ]

Project Leader: Dr Sofia Malamatidou

Size: 475,577 words; 1,512 texts

Compilation: 2017 - work in progress

Language: English and Greek non-translated, and English translated

Project Home Page: https://​www​.birmingham​.ac​.uk​/research​/activity​/bct​/research​/index​.aspx

Funding: University of Birmingham research grant

Affiliation: University of Birmingham

Texts compiled from the following online sources:

Discover Greece. Accessed July 15, 2017. https://​www​.discovergreece​.com.

Incredible Crete. Accessed July 15, 2017. https://​www​.incrediblecrete​.gr.

Visit England. Accessed July 15, 2017. https://​www​.visitengland​.com.

Visit Greece. Accessed July 15, 2017. www​.visitgreece​.gr.

Visit Scotland. Accessed July 15, 2017. https://​www​.visitscotland​.com.

Visit Wales. Accessed July 15, 2017. http://​www​.visitwales​.com.

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