Translating, Transcreating or Mediating the Foreign? The Translator’s Space of Manoeuvre in the Field of Tourism

Translating tourism promotional material means negotiating the encounter with the Other, that is a foreign destination which is perceived as fundamentally different vis-à-vis the domestic context, from a specific linguistic, historical, geographic and cultural point of view. The task of the translator is to find ways to convey the foreign into discourse: far from eradicating difference in their translations, translators of tourism texts have to retain a flavour of “otherness” that will ensure that the destination is perceived as different from the “familiar”. According to Cohen’s seminal works (1972; Cohen and Cooper 1986), novelty and strangeness lie at the basis of the tourist experience, and the familiarity-strangerhood dichotomy is also indicated by Dann as a fundamental communicative strategy “for those engaged in the marketing of destinations” (1996, 17). The present article will be framed by a series of questions representing the scope, as well as the boundaries, of a research in progress. The first question follows directly from the previous passage and concerns the role of the translator in the field of tourism: to what extent are translators supposed to engage themselves with the marketing of destinations? Are translators responsible for and/or directly involved in the promotion and merchandising processes of tourist offers, when they translate brochures, leaflets, flyers, catalogues, articles in specialized magazines or even tourist guidebooks?