The distinctive features of tourism translation

When we work on a certain type of translation, it is always necessary to find out or identify the features of the target that we studied the tourism English translation have distinctive features which distinguish it from the other varieties of English translation.

So I’d like to talk about it from some points of view.

Firstly, like some other kinds of English translation, such as legal or journalism English translation, tourism English has its own lexical features besides the general use of English vocabulary. There are some words or phrases which are specially used in tourism English and are called terms of tourism English.

Here is one example, before a flight sets off, the flight attendants might inform the passengers: “Please stow all hand or carry-on luggages under the seat in front of you or in the overhead compartments.”(请把所有随身的行李放到您前面的座位下或者是头顶置物架上)

The sentence might be obscure to one tourist who has been on a plane for his or her first time, as there are some tourism English -specific terms in this sentence. Here “hand or carry-on luggage” refers to the stuff which is brought aboard the plane by the passengers. The word “stow” means to put something away. So this sentence could be paraphrased as follows:

Hand or carry-on luggage could be put away either under the seat or in a special compartment which is above the seat over the head of the passenger.

Then there are abundances of proper names which could be found everywhere in tourism English. Proper names in tourism English have a wide of range from the names of a destination like a country, a city, an area or a tourism spot, to the name of a hotel, a café ,a building or even a bus station, whose forms, pronunciations and spellings usually could not be changed and wildly accepted by local people in a fixed way.

Read Also: Travel Translation

For example:

Effiel tower, 法国艾菲尔铁塔(France)

arch of triumph, 法国凯旋门(France)

Buckingham palace,英国白金汉宫(England)

Hyde park,英国海德公园(England)

Monte Carlo, Monaco， 摩洛哥蒙特卡罗(摩洛哥)

Melaka，马六甲（马来西亚）

Tian’anmen（or the Gate of Heavenly Peace），天安门

Proper names have constituted a huge part of the vocabulary in the tourism English.

To be continued……

Take a look at how we helped our client by localizing their project for Tourism Industry Translation. Click here to read the complete case study