International tourism is one of the largest and the most dynamic sectors, which inevitably influences several aspects of social life, including language. Language offers a capacity in swaying tourists’ decisions when planning out their travels to certain countries. In exploring the parts of the world, it is unnecessary for people to fluently speak the local languages of the destinations they visit.
They tend to choose a convenient solution by relying their travel plans on credible tour agents that facilitate them with communication in their mother tongues. It is no wonder that travel agents, especially those that focus on the foreign tourist market provide information in various languages to attract more customers. They have a range of information services, including but not limited to travel guides, websites and maps, menus, brochures, leaflets, websites, catalogues, and audio guides.
With the massive growth of several supporting industries, such as transportation services, airlines, hotels, museums, restaurants, and governments, tourism development is boosted and acknowledged as an essential sector that promotes the state economy.
As an impact, businesses in language sector, such as translation also take crucial parts in developing the quality of the industries. Tourism contents are commonly focused on marketing services by involving the target audience, including through testimonies and socio-cultural references. To provide specific contents that offer similar impacts across distinctive languages, localisation services are urgently required.
Throughout the years, a number of tourism terms are continually coined, increasing scientific interests in the questions of translating tourism terminology into different languages. However, this coinage of tourism terms has also led to some confusion in the endeavour of translation.
Tourism terms can be relative, since terms are interchangeable between groups. For instance, full board or B&B can belong both to terminology used in accommodation and catering groups, while reservation is used in accommodation, catering and excursion groups.
Moreover, abbreviations can be found in all groups of tourism terminology. Due to the problems that abbreviations create for translators and readers, it is appropriate to form them into separate groups to further investigate relevant strategies for their translation. Translation Contributions to The Evergrowing Tourism Industry. Following are several problems related to tourism translation:
Inconsistency in Tourism Translation
Tourism is closely related to the encounter of different cultures. When it comes to tourism terms, it could be quite confusing due to the cultural differences in concepts when making use of the same tourism terms in different countries. The ideal of terminology ‘one concept – one term’ is sometimes not applicable and could even be misleading when dealing with tourism terms.
Some examples of this discrepancy derive from hotelier-related terms. Terms used within one hotel do not necessarily equate to the other hotels. “Standards” for standard rooms may vary between hotels of different countries or even hotels within the same country. “Economy” rooms in some countries offer shared facilities to their guests while “Economy” rooms in other countries offer en suite facilities, yet with no balcony or are smaller in size. In some countries, rooms are qualified superior or deluxe though they have the same facilities as the standard rooms in other parts of the world.
There is no clear reference concerning bed size as well, leading to some king-size beds, which are ‘more king-sized’ than the other ones. Likewise, if there is an abbreviation, such as B&B (or ABF) in a hotel reservation confirmation, some hotels will offer their guests buffet-type breakfast with a wide selection of foods, while in other hotels the visitors will have a set breakfast (e.g., some bacon-and-eggs with toast, butter, jam, and a cup of tea or coffee). Such discrepancies in general tourism concepts add more challenge to the question of tourism terminology standardization to say nothing of translation itself.
Synonymy Challenges in Tourism Terminology
With the booming tourism industry, the coinage of many tourism terms around the world may denote the same concept. For instance, the use of terms, such as American Plan (AP), full pension (FP), and full board (FB) all indicate that the price of the room includes three meals a day. A similar case of synonymy can be seen in terms, such as Modified American Plan (MAP), half pension (HP), and half board (HB) that all mean that the room rate includes breakfast and either lunch or dinner.
Another example of tourism terms synonymy refers to the concept of a person escorting a tour group during a trip, such as tour manager, tour conductor, tour escort, tour leader, tour director, or tour courier. At the same time, tour manager is used to denote a person called tour agent in the country of Ukraine and Russia or travel agent in other countries.
Polysemy: Dealing with Multiple Meanings
On the other hand, tourism industry also has a number of terms with multiple meanings depending on the context, which is called polisemy. These cases of polysemy are the most frequent with abbreviations, for example, the acronym FIT is used to denote both Free and Independent Traveler and Foreign Individual Traveler, CTA could mean Canadian Tourism Alliance and Close to Arrival, AA could denominate American Airlines, Aerolineas Argentinas, Automobile Association, always afloat and apparent attitude. T
he existence of these polysemic terms necessitate context-based attention on translator’s part. The points mentioned above delivered the home industry necessity of an accurate, non-ambiguous tourism terminology, thus a standardization of tourism terminology can offer a solution.
Standardization of Tourism Terminology: Pros and Cons
As the tourism industry is a business that apply to global audience, terminologies that could facilitate a global understanding are becoming more necessary. Standardization of tourism terminology may support this endeavour by increasing the precision of translation through the reduction of synonymy and polysemy. It will also minimize inconsistencies of coined tourism terms by compressing different contexts and vocabularies into one particular form of language.
Standardization may offer more benefits with a raise in quality of tourism industry’s translation, as translators will be able to remake communicative effects from source texts into the target text. Translators will no longer need to explain the exact concept within a certain terminology, resulting in a translation with higher level of precision and avoidance of misunderstandings. However, as international traveling is becoming more common, supply and demand development as well as creation of new terminology proceeds ever more rapidly. Due to this issue, the idea of the standardization of tourism terminology may also raise new questions and create new challenges.
Coinage of further new tourism terminology may impede the efforts of standardizing tourist terms. This conundrum is further emphasized by how the procedure of standardization is still under refinement and far from completion. Not to mention, the process of standardization of tourism terms itself is not an easy feat.
Standardization should follow a two-step process consisting of unifying and fixing each word within the source texts followed by unifying and standardizing them in the target language. It is also important to note that standardizing these tourist terms carry the risk of inaccurate representation of existing forms. Despite these challenges to standardization, it is still important to raise the question of the possibility in standardizing tourism terminology.
Limitations of Standardization in Tourism Translation
As mentioned in the previous few paragraphs, considerable inconsistencies are present within the concepts of certain tourism terms. Tourists who are not familiar with a different form of terminology compared to the one that they are used to might find difficulty in communicating despite these terminologies having the same concept. Certain hotels or businesses might also suffer due to different understanding of certain terms, such as what exactly fits the concept of standard or economy rooms.
Further emphasis on this point, these discrepancies may raise security and safety considerations due to how they affect tourists’ traveling experiences and any background knowledge of available facilities, as well as the preparation of travel agents responsible for preparing holiday arrangements.
Therefore, the idea of standardizing tourism terminology is substantiated despite the risks and challenges mentioned. However, the process of standardizing these tourism-related terms has several limitations. Aside from the risk of inaccurate representation, standardization also carry the risk of not representing the cultural aspects associated with the existing forms. The global nature of tourism itself is one of the biggest limitations to standardization probability.
Furthermore, as the development of international traveling has led to the rapid creation of new concepts and formation of new terminology, further investigation of tourism terminology is necessary to keep up with and add into the possibility of unifying all referents and designations within the tourism industry.
Future Research Directions in Tourism Terminology Studies
Studies on tourism terminology attempts to prove that the level of density on terminologies within tourist texts is receiver-dependent. With more interest in the idea of standardizing tourism terminology, future research could lead to a higher generalization of results. It is expected to produce relevant question regarding the practice of acronyms formation and usage in tourism, as well as tackle any confusion in certain situations where contexts are not readily available.
Moreover, the methods of translation used for these tourism abbreviations could be further investigated and studied. Understanding the concept behind the terminology depends on the translators’ understanding of the terms. With further investigations, correlation between proper and improper translation of tourism terms may be determined, increasing the potential of standardized tourism terms. Standardization, of course, is not the only translation procedure one could make use to translate tourism terms.
Translators of tourism texts should also make use of literal or direct strategies by translating a text word-for-word, transposition byreplacing words or sentences into those with equal meaning, and naturalization by encoding source text into the target language through the reduction of strangeness.
Translation Strategies for Tourism Terminology
When it comes to translating tourism terminology and text, standardization is not exactly a conventional procedure. However, this does not mean that standardization is not a viable way to translate tourist terms and texts. Further investigation and study are necessary to approve or disprove the possibility of utilizing standardization. Professional language contribution to tourism industry can assist the alleviation of confusion stemming from certain ambiguous terminologies.
With regards to the notion, Linguwiz is committed to providing relevant services for tourism-related translation. We work with expert translators with years of experiences and commendable education backgrounds that guarantee our service quality efficiently and accurately.
For us, translating is not merely a process of transferring. It is more than that. Translation is a bridge to humanity, which is the principle of our existence. In the evolving industry of translation, Linguwiz has dealt with a number of reputable clients, ranging from the government to private sectors.
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