Tourism Across Languages and Cultures: Accessibility Through Translation

The language of tourism has been defined as a specialised kind of discourse, and this is especially clear in the context of cross-cultural communication. This article will investigate the ways in which translators need to mediate tourist texts in order to achieve successful communication. The main challenge is represented by the so-called cultural specific elements, that is the cultural traits which characterise destinations from a specific historical, geographic, and social point of view. The purpose of tourism is to negotiate the encounter with the Other, and in doing so identities have to be mediated and often re-fashioned. Experts in the field of tourism set themselves the task of translating the foreign into discourse, so as to produce a sense of otherness that can be recognized as different from the familiar. But the only way to make “difference” recognizable to a home/target culture is to exploit domestic material and techniques to build the foreign into discourse. Hence, those traits of tourist destinations potentially perceived as excessively “exotic” are often rewritten or mediated, so as to create familiar and agreeable images for a readership that is made up of tourists. The object of this article is to analyse what happens when tourism-fashioned identities are transported across linguistic and cultural borders. I shall work on tourist discourse in a perspective of translation intended as a cross-cultural practice, highlighting degrees of mediation of linguistic and textual features, and culture-specific elements.