CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION BY MEANS OF TRANSLATING TOURIST TEXTS

Olena Skibitska

Prykarpatskyi National University, Ukraine

Cross-cultural Communication in Translation of Tourist Texts

Functional theories of translation regard communicative function as a determinant in making a translator’s decision. Communication itself is conventionally considered as an exchange of information between individuals using the common sign system, lingual signs in particular.

The questions of intercultural communication have been examined by many different scholars, such as Nord 2006, Jakobson 1985, Schaffner 1995, Holliday 2004, Katan 1998 to mention just a few. According to Christiane Nord (2006) communicative function is not inherent in the linguistic signs. Receivers find their own meaning in the text. Therefore, the readers can come to different conclusions depending on their own communication needs or expectations.

Given the influence of communicative needs in terms of cross-cultural dialogue, the current research focuses on purpose-oriented translation of tourist texts taking into account the general characteristics of tourist texts and tourism language.

The determination of tourist text types is a challenge complicated enough to serve as the basis for the separate investigation. The complex nature of the tourist text definitions lies in the very nature of the interdisciplinary fields that compose the international tourism as an industry. In our research we make clear classification of the types of tourist texts based on the comprehensive evaluation of both industry-specific and linguistic-oriented analysis. Furthermore, we examine the influence of communicative intention on the process of creating and translating a receiver-oriented tourist text. It is also very important to define the tourist discourse or the language of tourism and examine its main characteristics paying special attention to some widely used in tourist texts groups of lexis. The detailed analysis of the data seems to indicate the vast usage of adjectives with positive evaluation, often in the superlative degree (splendid, glorious, magnificent, fantastically decorated, the best of etc), of verbs intended “to persuade, lure, woo and seduce millions of human beings” (Dann, 1996) into the virtual world of travelling (escape, lead away, drift off, relax, enjoy, discover etc) resulting in quite a realistic purchase of a tourist product. In addition, common usage of culture-specific lexical units or realia, having no direct equivalent in the target language (tom yum, varenyky, zurek, mezze, hummus, lecso etc), is typical for tourist texts and brings up some additional issues to the subject.

The translation itself is a social and communicative kind of activity. Being an indirect communicative act, translation paves the way for inter-national, inter-lingual and inter-cultural contact. And translator thus becomes the mediator between not only languages but between cultures, way of life and mentality of different peoples. Nida (2001) argues that the difference between cultures can present a more serious challenge to translators than the difference between languages. A text, embedded into any culture is both possible and impossible to translate adequately. Therefore accuracy and adequacy of translation depends on the purpose of translation. The translation of the tourist texts is oriented towards target reader be it the reader of the source (original) text or the target (translated) text. The problem still leaves much to be investigated by means of functionality, purposefulness and equivalence of the tourist text.

How can the source tourist text be rendered into the target language without losing its communicative intention? What is more important – to convey meaning or to retain form? Should translators of the tourist texts take readers to the source text or should they bring text to the target recipient? How does the translation of tourist texts differ from that of the other specialized text types? These are but a few questions that arise when dealing with problems of translating tourist texts. The answers to the above reach far beyond the scope of the present research and are dealt with in this work as well as the other works of the author.

REFERENCES

1. Dann, G.M.S. 1996. The Language of Tourism – A Sociolinguistic Perspective. Oxford: CAB International

2. Holliday A., Kullman J., Hyde M. 2004. Intercultural Communication: An Advanced Resource Book. London and New York: Routledge.

3. Jakobsob R. 1985. Selected Papers. Moscow: Progress

4. Katan D. 1998. Translating Cultures: An Introduction for Translators, Interpreters and Mediators. Manchester: St.Jerome.

5. Nida E.A. 2001. Contexts in Translating. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: J.Benjamins Publishing Company.

6. Nord C. 2006. Translating for Communicative Purposes Across Culture Boundaries:A Skopos-oriented Approach to Translation. Journal of Translation Studies (Chinese University of Hongkong) 9 (2006),1:59-76.

7. Schaffner C. 1995. Culture in Translation and Translation Studies. In Schaffner C., Kelly-Holmes H. (eds). Cultural Functions of Translation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters: 1-8.