Gloria Cappelli - University of Pisa

 

Smoothing the way: tourist guidebooks for children in the English- and Italian-speaking world

Tourist guidebooks are among the most investigated genres in tourism discourse both for their function and for their linguistic features (Cappelli 2006, Nigro 2006, Vestito 2012, Maci 2013 to name but a few). Through language, they  guide the tourists in their real or imaginary journey and out-of-the-ordinary experience (Dann 1996), contribute to lead the “tourist gaze” (Urry 2002) by guiding the “tourist glances” (Urry 2001) both at the pre- and on-trip stages of the tourist experience while “firing imagination” (Dann 1996). They also contribute to closing the gap between the tourists’ culture and the destination’s culture (Fodde and Denti 2005), and for this reason they have been described as “culture brokers” (Cohen 1985). They offer to the tourist “foreign culture in a nutshell” (Dybiec 2008). By providing instructions on how to interpret the foreign culture, they make culture-specific knowledge and specialized concepts accessible, and thus contribute to the processes of socialization and enculturation of the traveller.   

Guidebooks for children represent an interesting subgenre in this regard. Children generally do not  have well-established cultural filters and needs. Their “tourist gaze” still needs to be built and developed and their expectations about the destination (if any) might be completely different from those of the adult travellers. The contents presented must be suitable for their cognitive abilities and general knowledge. This leads to an interesting shift in the main parameter according to which guidebooks have been investigated. Rather than attracting, guidebooks for children have to entertain, and rather than guiding the tourist gaze, they have to create it while educating the young traveller.

Guidebooks for children have a long-standing tradition in the English-speaking world, but they are still in their infancy in Italy. The latter appear to be an emerging genre in the Italian context, probably due to the influence of the Anglo-Saxon model. English and Italian guidebooks for children (including their translations) will be discussed in terms of their structural and linguistic properties. Special attention will be devoted to text accessibility attained through recontextualization and ‘anchoring’ strategies (notably in the form of culture-bound references), pervasive in the genre as a whole and especially common in the subgenre at issue to bring the information closer to the experience of the reader

 

 

Laura Centonze - University of Salento

 

Beauty is in the eye of MygranTour. A case study of migrant-driven intercultural urban routes across Europe

The aim of this paper is to gain insights into the relation between tourism and the perception as well as the process of appropriation/subjectivisation of the main tourist landmarks on the part of foreign tourist guides in their routes across some of the most important European cities. Specifically, we report the results of a case study that was carried out on so-called “migrantourism” (www.mygrantour.com), a newly-emerging phenomenon whose objective is to assist the integration of migrant citizens into nine participant European cities (i.e. Turin, Milan, Genoa, Florence, Rome, Marseille, Paris, Valencia and Lisbon) by means of informal intercultural walks on which migrants act as tourist guides. In this role, they are committed to illustrating the city’s main tourist attractions and the city’s key points from their own perspective and experience.

Partly using Wordsmith Tools 6 (Scott 2012), we adopt a corpus-driven methodology (Tognini-Bonelli 2001, p. 84-85) that combines both quantitative and qualitative approaches, and thereby provide an overview of the different perspectives adopted by migrants in their revisitation of their past experience as new arrivals / tourists. By analyzing the transcriptions of some videos available posted on the internet, we shall examine the extent to which the different endonormative (L1-oriented; see Seidlhofer 2001) lingua franca variations employed by migrant tourist guides (e.g. Italian as a Lingua Franca for migrants in Milan etc., French as a Lingua Franca for migrantsin in Paris) encode concepts linked to culture-bound elements and locations (e.g. local food, local customs and traditions). We will also analyze how personal views and individualized perceptions of the host country and community, in particular experiences of integration, successful or not, as related by migrant guides can be seen to be informed by their native lingua-cultural schemata (see Guido 2008). Hence, as Mitchell (2001 cit. in Knudsen et al. 2008) states, “the meaning of landscape, like all meaning, is created, recreated, and contested in social processes”.

As well as providing a brief tour d’horizon of the main features of the diverse lingua franca variations found in the scripts, this study contributes to the already-existing literature in the field of intercultural communication and the negotiation of meaning, and tourism accessibility to culture-bound elements on the part of migrants.

 

 

Daniela Cesiri - University of Venice

 

Promoting Venice through digital travel guides: some case studies of texts written in English and in Italian

The city of Venice is currently promoted through a wide range of channels, either traditional or innovative, using the Internet as their main ‘market place’. The promotional message is conveyed in Italian and in English as the main foreign language of communication, addressing not only perspective tourists from English-speaking countries as also tourists who, regardless their mother tongue, use English to communicate outside their country.

Considering the role that both Italian and English used as lingua franca play in the promotion of Venice, the present study investigates the language that is used to ‘advertise’ the city.

The study will compare and contrast digital travel guides, written in English and in Italian, that are accessible on the Internet to a wider audience than their corresponding printed editions. The contribution will investigate the lexical features and phraseology used to describe the most peculiar aspects of Venice and its local culture, taking into particular consideration instances of the ‘languaging’ technique.

Dann (1996: 184) describes the technique of languaging in tourist texts as “the impressive use of foreign words, but also a manipulation of the vernacular, special choice of vocabulary, and not just for its own sake”. In this context, the author puts him/herself in an authoritative position, as the expert who lectures the tourist on specific elements of the host culture that will be found upon arrival at the destination.

In this respect, Venice is full of cultural and dialectal characteristics that hardly find a literal translation in standard Italian or in a foreign language. Therefore, the aim of the work is to investigate the strategies used to promote and explain Venice’s local culture to non-Venetians,and to non-Italians in general, thus considering whether the linguistic techniques employed vary according to the different levels of presumed previous knowledge that the authors attribute to the visitors according to their nationality; that is to say, texts addressing Italian customers might presume that Italian tourists already possess minimum knowledge of the local dialect in contrast to foreigners who might have no previous knowledge of both the local culture and dialect. The analysis, then, will consider the variable of ‘the guests’ culture’ to account for possible differences and/or similarities in the instances of languaging found in the digital travel guides.

 

 

Thomas Wulstan Christiansen - University of Salento

 

Translanguaging and its effects on accessibility in Travel Writing

Within the field of applied linguistics and particularly bilingual education, scholars (see Baker 2001, Garcia 2009) are paying increasing attention the phenomena of translanguaging whereby languages (seen as manifestations of the activity of communicating, rather than as separate system) are used in conjunction with each other as expression of an individual's linguistic repertoire. Such an approach recognises that the relationship between languages is fluid and dynamic rather than rigid and mutually exclusive. It can also be relevant to areas such as creative writing, when authors mix and match forms from different sources not only to reflect their own linguistic repertoire but also for stylistic effect appealing to ethos and establishing authorial stance (Cherry 1998, Kockelman 2004). In the specific genre of travel writing, such translanguaging can be used a strategy partly (but not exclusively) to introduce items from the source language, adding the lingua-cultural insights that readers of such works may expect, thereby establishing the expertise and credentials of the writer.In this paper, we will examine the writings of H.V. Morton specifically regarding his visit to Apulia 1966 contained in the work: A Traveller in Southern Italy (1968). Analysis will concentrate on the types of phenomena which are accessed through translanguaging, mainly in Italian but also in other codes such as local dialects, Lation, or French. We examine wheter these concepts are explained further to the reader, either through accompanying translations, glosses, or by means of cohesive ties, such as co-reference or anaphora (Reinhart 1983, Cornish 1999, Christiansen 2011).Instances of translanguaging will be categorised and compared in an effort to explain when and why each is used. The aim will be to show how introducing unfamiliar forms and concepts through translanguaging can empower readers, as active partecipants in the discourse to access the relevant culture by adapting and expanding their own lingua-cultural schemata.

 

Laura Antonella Colaci - University of Salento

 

A contrastive socio-cultural and linguistic analysis of Italian and German tourist websites

Over the past decades, tourism has become a key sector in the world’s economy and a critical source of economic growth and development for many countries. Tourists depend on many sources, including websites, in their search for destinations and travel-buying process.

The present study aims at describing and comparing the cultural-bound and phraseological

structures of German and Italian websites in order to observe how tourist information is rendered in the two languages. The assumption that the stylistic differences in the choice of lexis, grammatical categories, textual and contextual elements in German and Italian tourist websites will be investigated to ascertain whether they entail a difference in the culture and thinking styles of the target public.

The contribution will use corpus linguistics methods of research and analysis to investigate thefigurative and non-figurative lexicon and phraseology found in the websites. By means of the program for corpus analysis Wordsmith Tools 6.0 (Scott 2012), I will investigate a corpus of German and Italian tourism websites, in particular the tourism promotional web sites of the 20 Italian regions and of the 16 German Bundesländer.

Particular attention will be paid to two main aspects: 

- Cultural-bound aspects: Ethnocentricity is always a risk in cross-cultural marketing activities, because those strategies that are successful in a country (or within a culture) do not always work abroad (or in a different culture) (see Prime 2003; Manca 2013). For this reason, this paper presents a linguistic and cultural analysis of the strategie s adopted by German’s Bundesländer and Italian regions in their websites;

- Emotional phraseology: The analysis proposed in this paper concentrates on the way words and especially phraseology belonging to the semantic field of emotions that are used to describe holidays and locations in the different national and regional levels. The choice of the perspective is motivated by the frequent presence of emotional phraseology and direct references to the tourist/guest in the description of holiday offers in German websites. German websites are in fact more “intense” on many sources including websites than the Italian ones, involving every sensorial and emotive dimension of the person (see Magris 2012). Thus, it will be interesting to see if these results are also valid for a broader research.

 

 

Robin Cranmer - University of Westminster, London 

 

Accessibility in Tourist Communication - museums, galleries and beyond

This presentation will explore how museums, galleries and other cultural institutions can most effectively communicate with their international visitors. It will start with an attempt to analyse, drawing both on existing multi-disciplinary research and on the results of an extensive pilot project, how the needs and preferences of international visitors to museums and galleries might tend to vary as a function of their linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Communication, being of course a two-way process, attention will also be paid to some of the needs and priorities museums and galleries can have as well as constraints they can face.Communication strategies employed by museums and galleries in communicating with their international visitors will then be described and evaluated in terms of their ability to meet these needs. Amongst the strategies which will be considered will be the use of translations with or without adaptation or localisation and the use of texts in a lingua franca. Equally, other possible but less widely used strategies will also be described and evaluated.The presentation will conclude by examining ways forward. This will include discussion of what forms of strategy may currently make best sense, a proposal for the direction in which communication strategy might best evolve, an examination of the implications of the context of museums and galleries for other tourist contexts and suggestions for future research.

 

 

Angela D'Egidio - University of Salento

 

Investigating English and Italian Tourist Wor(l)ds through Automated Semantic Categorisation and Corpus Linguistics

To date, the language of tourism has been investigated by a number of corpus linguists. Although the research questions and methodological approaches adopted in literature vary greatly, most studies have combined computer-assisted corpus analysis at the lexical level and inductive and manual semantic categorization of results as a means of exploring tourist texts from different perspectives, such as cultural representations, stylistic choices and linguistic strategies (e.g. Cappelli 2013; D’Egidio 2014; Francesconi 2012; Manca 2013). With the exception of Maci (2013), several scholars inductively and manually classified findings in semantic categories.

This study showed a novel approach capable of linguistic operationalisation of the tourist gaze, i.e. what tourists actually gaze at when visiting a tourist site and how they evaluate it, using automated semantic categorisation and corpus-based methods. The analysis was based on eight comparable corpora of travel blogs and trip reports written in English by a variety of travellers (British, Americans and other English language users) and in Italian about two tourist destinations in Italy: the popular city of Florence, and Puglia, an off-the-beaten-track destination in the South of Italy.

The automatic semantic tagging of corpora was carried out by means of WMatrix (Rayson 2009) for the corpora in English and a prototype annotation tool for the corpora in Italian. These tools were useful for automatically assigning semantic tags to the corpora, identifying the most frequently occurring semantic categories and performing a keyness comparison at the semantic level. Subsequently, the dominant lexical items within a number of semantic categories were examined by means of WordSmith Tools 6.0 (Scott 2012). In particular, the most frequent collocates of the words under the most relevant or significant semantic fields and patterns in concordances for lexical items were investigated.

The analysis highlighted a number of strengths and weaknesses of the semantic annotation tools. Moreover, the methodological approach adopted in this study proved to yield comprehensive results for the linguistic analysis of the tourist gaze. The results confirmed an expected gaze difference in Florence and Puglia and outlined a number of common patterns of the English language tourists’ gaze, some patterns of the Italian language tourists’ gaze and differences between the English and Italian language tourists’ gaze.

The findings may be specifically used for the translation or production of the English version of Puglia Tourist Board website for an international English target readership in order to attract more tourists to this region of Italy.

 

 

Maria Elisa Fina - University of Salento

 

Audio Guides in English and Italian: a multimodal investigation

 

Over the last decades, new technologies have had significant impact on communication in the tourism domain, and have contributed to the reshaping of tourist genres by producing interactive, multimodal texts such as, for example, tourist apps (Denti 2013), promotional videos (Francesconi 2011), virtual tours. These ways of communicating tourism raise issues on how the translation of such new, hybrid texts should be dealt with in terms of both linguistic and socio-cultural aspects characterising source and target cultures.

This study aligns itself to this new trend in tourism studies and proposes a multimodal investigation of audio guides in English and Italian. While great attention has been paid to museum audio guides (O’Donnell 2000; Zancanaro 2003; Tempel and ten Thije 2010; Devile et al. 2012; Neves 2012), the focus of this study will be professional audio guides of cities.

The particular nature of the audio guide as a text type lies in its complex medium (Crystal 1994), as the scripts of the audio tours bear the complexity of a written text but they are destined to oral delivery. Thus, in order to accomplish their guiding function, audio tours are expected to embed a series of linguistic and non-linguistic features, and to organise structure and content, to ensure usability and involve the visitor.

The corpus includes 50 original audio guides of Italian, British and American destinations, which have been qualitatively analysed from a multimodal perspective and compared in order to identify similarities and differences in ways of describing and narrating places.

Accessibility in audio guides will be investigated in reference to accompanying maps, practical information and the use of technical language to describe buildings; whereas visitor’s involvement will be investigated in terms of ‘soundscape’ (van Leeuwen 1999), by looking at the interaction of speech and sounds to evoke pictures in the visitor’s mind.

The analysis shows that there are significant differences between audio tours in Italian and English, and issues will be addressed about possible guidelines for producing effective English versions of Italian audio tours.  

 

Sabrina Francesconi- University of Trento

 

(In)tangible heritage tourism discourse across cultures

The multifarious and multifaceted notion of heritage encompasses natural or cultural forms, including objects, places and practices, in their tangible or intangible expressions. Constantly nourished by people’s attachments, identities and sense of belonging, intangible heritage poses serious challenges in terms of both preservation and accessibility. Such tension is at stake within heritage tourism promotional discourse, whereby heritage is presented and communicated - across cultures - for tourist purposes.

Deeply-rooted in local cultures, imbued with their histories, values, beliefs, social organization patterns, traditional dances epitomize intangible heritage. Seen from a socio-semiotic perspective, dance is, indeed, a semiotic resource, a resource for making meaning within a social context. The mode of dance, hence, carries affordances and constraints, the latter to be mainly identified in terms of accessibility. Via processes of transduction, performances are yet re-presented and made accessible within tourism discourse by the means of visual, acoustic, verbal, audio-visual resources, relying on printed, electronic, or digital media as material supports. The inspection of modes and forms of such representation is the scope of this paper. 

 

 

Nickolas Demitios George Komninos - University of Udine

 

Tourism across boarders

This paper deals with nonverbal and intercultural communication in the tourist industry focussing on research carried out in five SMEs in North Italy. English language is commonly the lingua franca in the interactions between tourist institutions and often the language of the promotion itself. However, the cultural frameworks of reference of the sender and of the receiver is often not shared and not English. There is a potential for a cultural, as well as interpersonal, lack of knowledge between the sender and receiver that can lead to misinterpretation, miscommunication or even offence. This can hinder or even form an obstacle for regional promotion in the tourist sector. The main question asked here is ‘How does intercultural communicative competence and intercultural training affect the promotion of tourism and regional development to international audiences’. The paper analyses the current situation in five companies in North Italy through the analysis of semi-structured interviews and questionnaires. Focus is made on intercultural communicative competence in the business setting with reference to conflict management in relation to politeness and face theory (Brown and Levinson, Cheng), intercultural conflict (Ting-Toomey), and cultural differences in business protocols (Ambady and Samovar). Negotiation is also considered as an encounter-clash between models (Trevisani), cultural effects on goals, attitudes, personal and communicative style, time sensitivity, agreement form and process, team organization and risk taking are also considered (Salacuse), as is nonverbal behaviour (Samovar et al.) . Finally team management is considered with reference to organizational differences and differences in strategy (Holmes), leadership differences, and Emotional Intelligence Diversity (EID): affirmative introspection, self-governance, intercultural literacy and social architecting (Sorrels). Results and analysis are presented and future areas of research considered.

 

 

Maria Grazia Guido, Cesare Amatulli, Lucia Errico, Pietro Luigi Iaia - University of Salento

 

‘Lingua franca’ narratives of ancient and modern ‘odysseys’ across the Mediterranean sea: An Experiential-Linguistic approach to the Marketing of Responsible Tourism

This paper introduces an interdisciplinary research exploring the emotional experience of Italian seaside resorts whose geographical position in the Southern Mediterranean coasts has always determined their destiny as places of hospitality and hybridization of languages and cultures. A cognitive-pragmatic model of Experiential Linguistics (Sweetser 1990; Langacker 1991; Lakoff & Johnson 1999) and some strategies of Experiential Place Marketing (Jani & Han 2013; Prayag et al. 2013) will be applied to the ‘emotional promotion’ of Responsible Tourism (Roseman 2001; Hosany & Prayag 2011; Ma et al. 2013; Lin et al. 2014) in order to enquire into the effects of emotions upon the tourists’ perception of the holiday as an experience of ‘personal and cultural growth’. This is expected to develop from their appraisal (White 2002) of: (a) the epic narratives of Mediterranean ‘odysseys’ towards ‘utopian places’ belonging to the western cultural heritage, translated from ancient (Greek and Latin) into modern (English and Italian) ‘lingua francas’, and (b) the contemporary non-western migrants and refugees’ dramatic narrations of journeys across the sea, reported in ‘lingua-franca’ English and Italian (Guido 2008, 2012). The subjects of the case study under analysis are tourists playing the role of ‘intercultural mediators’ with migrants in one of the seaside resorts of Salento affected by migrant arrivals. To facilitate the tourists’ process of ‘experiential embodiment’ of past and present dramatic sea voyages, they will be introduced to an ‘Ethnopoetic analysis’ (Hymes 1994, 2003) of two corpora of ancient and modern oral journey narratives – the former including extracts from Homer’s Odyssey, Apollonius Rhodius’s Argonautica and Virgil’s Aeneid, and the latter collected during ethnographic fieldworks in reception centres for refugees. The purpose is to make tourists play also the roles of ‘philologists’ and ‘ethnographers’ as they realize how such ancient and modern oral narratives are organized into spontaneous ‘verse structures’ reproducing the sequences and rhythms of human actions and emotions in response to the traumatic experience of violent natural phenomena (waves, wind, etc.) which, through the use of ergative syntactic structures (Talmy 1988), become metaphorically personified as mythological monsters, or as objects and elements endowed with an autonomous, dynamic force capable of destroying the human beings at their mercy. The Ethnopoetic analysis and translation, together with the subsequent dramatization and multimodal rendering (Kress 2009) of such journey narratives aim at making both tourists and migrants aware of the socio-cultural values of the different populations that have produced them.

 

 

Jin Lan - Rikkyo University of Tokyo

 

The Current Situation and Issues of Translations in Rural Areas of Japan

The purpose of my study is to call for attention to translation issues in those areas. I also hope it will be helpful in devising an appropriate translation method for those areas in the future. Japanese people, particularly those who live in local areas, don’t have much experience with dealing withforeign visitors, neither do they receive enough support with  translations for their local businesses from the local, regional, or national government. There have been many problems and inconveniences for foreign visitors to local travel spots, in the northeastern areas of Japan in particular, which suffered huge damage from a tsunami in 2011. We still cannot assert there won’t be such a tsunami in those areas again, which means it is very dangerous for foreign visitors there if they cannot understand Japanese well.

In this study, at first I will explain the increase in popularity of traveling to, and within, rural areas among foreigners who live in Japan. I will talk about the styles of travel that most foreign visitors chose for their travels in local areas via the data which I obtained through questionnaire surveys, and interviews.

I will then provide an analysis of the current situation regarding translations in those local travel spots from my investigation. The targets will include sightseeing sign boards in the streets, figure signs in public places and brochures which are distributed in train stations, tourist information centers and other public places, including the contents of the designs, and the locations in which they are available. I will give several examples in this part.

Lastly, I will discuss the good and bad points of those measures for improving the current situation which exists in Japan. I willalso provide recommendations of more effective methods.

 

 

 

Novriyanto Napu- University of South Australia

 

Translating promotional materials: insights from the commissioning process

Translation quality is one of the main concerns in the translation of promotional materials. The promotional materials and their translation are important because they bridge between the foreign visitors and tourism destination. Therefore, a high quality of translation is essential in order to guarantee that tourists have a full understanding about the place that they are considering visiting. Translation of the promotional materials is particularly important for regional tourism industry in Indonesia. The government through the Tourism Board has commissioned and published English translations for the Indonesian tourism materials such as brochures which are publicly available. However, the analysis has shown that the English translation is far from being high quality translation which therefore prevents it from achieving its purpose for tourism promotion. The aim of this paper is to examine the extent to which the commissioning process of translation has an impact on the level of the translation quality of the promotional materials. The analysis is based on the interview data from a number of staff members at the Tourism Board who are involved in the process of commissioning translations at the Tourism Board in Gorontalo Indonesia. The paper will specifically discuss the translation commissioning process in terms of how the people

understand the purpose of the translation, the procedures of translator’s selection, the translation

commission and quality assurance. The paper argues that the commissioning process is inadequate and that has influenced the quality of the translation commissioned by the Tourism Board. This inadequate commissioning process is due to lack of understanding of the translation purpose among the staff that has been carried on to the whole process.

 

 

 

Sandra Navarro - University of São Paulo

 

Travelers’ reviews across cultures: a corpus-based study of the English-Portuguese language pair

Online social travel networking is changing the way tourists plan their trips. TripAdvisor, today’s largest travel community on the web, allows people to interact, share experiences and rely on other travelers’ reviews when planning their holidays. Such wealth of user generated content has become an important tourist text type for the comprehension of traveler’s expectations, needs and values.

Based on the assumption that our values ultimately reflect our culture (Hofstede, 2001), this study aims to carry out a corpus-based investigation of travelers’ reviews from a cross-cultural and sociolinguistic perspective, examining the Brazilian Portuguese and American English language pair.

The study corpus currently contains a total of 5,000 hotel reviews written by Brazilian and American travelers describing their experiences in hotels in their respective home countries. In numerical terms, the Portuguese subcorpus has 2,500 reviews and 248,740 words and the English subcorpus is made up of 2,500 reviews and 478,000 words. Moreover, there was an attempt to equally represent different types of opinions, from very negative to very positive ones, by drawing on the website’s rating scale: terrible, poor, average, very good and excellent.

This data was analyzed according to the methodology proposed by Corpus Linguistics approaches (Sinclair, 1996; Tognini-Bonelli, 2001), first functionally-complete units of meaning are identified in L1 and their equivalents in L2; later results are interpreted based on the theories developed by Intercultural Studies, such as High Context Culture and Low Context Culture (Hall, 1976) and Cultural Dimensions of Hofstede (2001).

Some of the initial results obtained so far have shown considerable differences between English and Portuguese reviews in terms of length, in line with the findings from studies of the tourism domain carried out with the Italian-English language pair (Manca, 2012; 2011; Fina, 2011). Further investigation of this aspect revealed that reviews’ length also varies significantly and consistently depending on the level of travelers’ satisfaction with the hotel experience.

 

 

 

Josélia Maria Santos José Neves - Hamad bin Khalifa University, Doha, Qatar

 

From Audio Guides to Descriptive Multisensory Guides, beyond blindness

The Wikipedia entry on audio guides reads: 

An audio tour or audio guide provides a recorded spoken commentary, normally through a handheld device, to a visitor attraction such as a museum. They are also available for self-guided tours of outdoor locations,[1] or as a part of an organised tour. It provides background, context, and information on the things being viewed. [2] Audio guides are often in multilingual versions and can be made available in different ways. Some of the more elaborate tours may include original music and interviews.

[3] Traditionally rented on the spot, more recently downloaded from the Internet or available via the mobile phone network. Some audio guides are free or included in the entrance fee, others have to be purchased separately.

This account is very close to what people in general understand audio guides to be and very much summarizes the most common audio guides made available to tourists and visitors at attractions all over the world. The baseline will be: “aural information about a specific attaction provided via a technological device to be used individually” or “words providing context for the understanding of reality(ies) that are foreign”. In practice, when people use audio guides on hop on hop off buses, or in museums and monuments, they are given information about what they are seeing and indirectly are told where to look and what to make out of what they see. Audio guides

are basically helping people understand what they are looking at.

The visual nature of most (tourism/museum) tours has led to the need for some degree of description so that people might identify what is being spoken about. Such information is particularly valuable for people with vision impairment. Special tours for blind people will take this descriptive approach to great lengths following specific guidelines to provide a"vivid description" (Vocaleyes n/d) of a given exhibit. In principle, sighted people would not require the description of what they can see for themselves; however, such description might lead them to see what might have gone unnoticed and make sense of what they see. If to this we add the opportunity to explore, through touch, what can be seen and/or heard about, the engagement of multiple senses will allow for an immersive experience that will promote perceptive wholeness and better understanding.

In this paper, I will explore the affordances of Descriptive Guides used in combination with tactile exploration to promote immersive multisensory experiences for blind and sighted people alike.

 

 

 

 

Mohamed Zain Sulaiman - National University of Malaysia

 

Translating Nature Tourism: A Cross-Cultural Journey into Naturescapes

Nature tourism is the most rapidly growing segment in the tourism industry, raising from approximately two percent of all tourism in the late 1980s to approximately 20 percent in 2013 (Newsome, Moore, & Dowling, 2013). Rapid urbanisation has motivated people to travel as tourists in search of natural landscapes and environments. A growing number of tourists throughout the world are beginning to cultivate an interest in seeing, experiencing and being inspired by natural areas. Such a global trend means that nature tourism has also become one of the most important categories marketed and promoted globally. Nevertheless, promoting nature tourism across languages and cultures might not be as straightforward as it may seem. Due to different worldviews and cultural values, both nature and tourism are conceptualised differently by different societies. These differing conceptualisations have significant implications on cross-cultural tourism promotion and therefore the translation of tourism promotional materials. Adopting a cultural-conceptual framework based on the functionalist approach to translation, the paper explores the challenges involved in translating English tourism promotional materials into Malay and investigates the extent to which naturescape themes employed to lure Anglophone tourists are compatible with the Malay culture. Three types of textual analysis are carried out: source text analysis, target text analysis, and parallel text analysis. The textual analyses are then complemented by finding derived from focus groups. The findings of the study reveal that in the Anglo culture, naturescapes are conceptualised within the secular framework of an earthly paradise, while in the Malay culture, it is conceptualised within the framework of divinity. Furthermore, the study also shows that while original, non-translated tourism promotional materials, in both English and Malay, capitalise on their respective audience’s conceptualisation of nature tourism, translated tourism promotional materials in Malay might tend to overlook this important aspect leading to potential failure.