“A pretty village is a welcome sight”
A contrastive study of the promotion of physical space in official tourism websites
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.
Article outline
- Introduction
- Language of tourism
- Physical space
- The language of euphoria
- Translation challenges
- Data and methods
- Results
- Nouns and adjectives
- English vs. Greek
- Translated vs. non-translated English
- Source vs. target texts
- Controlled promotion
- Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
Corpus reference
-
References
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.
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
Funding: University of Birmingham research grant
Affiliation: University of Birmingham
Texts compiled from the following online sources:
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Cited by (3)
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Malamatidou, Sofia
2024.
Final Reflections. In
Translating Tourism [
Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting, ],
► pp. 315 ff.

Liao, Min-Hsiu, Pedro Jesús Castillo Ortiz, Jemina Napier & Kester Newill
2023.
Translation and Interpretation in Cross-Cultural Business Workplace Practices. In
Intercultural Issues in the Workplace,
► pp. 193 ff.

Kefala, Stavroula
2021.
The pragmatics of translated tourism advertising.
Journal of Pragmatics 173
► pp. 88 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 30 december 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.