Strategies and Errors in Translating Tourism Brochures: the case of EFL Learners

Year 2015, Volume: 36 Issue: 3, 2766 - 2785, 13.05.2015

Tahereh Zahiri , Bahador Sadeghi Ataollah Maleki

Abstract

Abstract. Tourism English is a highly specialized discourse with its defining characteristics. In this study, the translation of travel brochures by Iranian EFL learners were studied. The study was carried out to reveal the nature of errors and strategies in Persian translations of English tourism brochures. The errors and strategies in translating travel brochures are under-researched in the tourism literature and similarly there is little discussion of tourism material in translation research. Thus, the current research was an attempt to fill a part of this gap. The participants of this research project were 20 sophomore students majoring in English Translation at Azad University. They were taking translation courses 1 and 2 respectively during the summer semester of 2014. The age of the participants ranged from 20 to 25 years and half of the participants were female learners. The results showed that translating travel brochures is just a lexical transfer but it encompasses cultural transfer where various strategies are used to translate travel brochures.

Keywords

Translating, Tourism, case of EFL Learners, Strategies

References

• Bryce, D., MacLaren, A. C., & O’Gorman, K. D. (2013). Historicising hospitality and tourism consumption: orientalist expectations of the Middle East. Consumption, Markets and Culture, 16(1), 45e64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2012.662830
• Bühler, K. (1990). Theory of Language: the Representational Function of Language. Translated by D. F. Goodwin. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
• Corder, S. P. (1967). The significance of learner’s errors.IRAL, 5, pp.161-170.
• Dann, G. (2001). The Language of Tourism: a Sociolinguistic Perspective. 2nd ed. Wallingford, UK: CAB International cop.
• Eftekhar, M., and Nouraey, P. (2013). Commercial Translation Error Analysis: A Case Study of Iranian Products Linguistics and Literature Studies 1(2): 55-60. http://www.hrpub.org DOI: 10.13189/lls.2013.010201
• Ellis, R. (1994). The study of second language acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Gass, S. &Selinker, L. (1994). Second language acquisition: An introductory course. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
• Hogg, G., Min-Hsiu Liao, M., and O’Gorman, K. (2014). Reading between the lines: Multidimensional translation in tourism Consumption. Tourism Management 42, 157-164.
• House, J. (1997). Translation quality assessment: A model revisited, Tübingen: Niemeyer.
• Kang, N. & Q. Yu. (2011). Corpus-based Stylistic Analysis of Tourism English. Journal of Language Teaching and Research. vol 2, issue 1, p.129-136 [Online]. Available at: http://www.ojs.academypublisher.com/index.php/jltr/article/view/0201129136 [Accessed 5th April 2013]
• Keshavarz, M. H. (1993). Contrastive analysis and error analysis. Tehran: Rahnama Publication.
• Lorscher, Wolfgang (1991): Translation performance, Translation Process, and Translation Strategies: A Psycholinguistic Investigation. Tubingen, Germany: Gunter NarrVerlag.
• Munday, Jeremy. 2001. Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications. London: Routledge.
• Nord, C. (1991). Text analysis in translation. Theory, method and didactic application of a model for translation-oriented text analysis. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
• Nord, C. (1991): Scopos, loyalty and translational conventions. Target, 3 (1), pp. 91-109.
• Ryan, C., &Gu, H. (2010). Constructionism and culture in research: understandings of the fourth Buddhist Festival, Wutaishan, China. Tourism Management, 31(2), 167-178.
• Seguinot, Candace (1991): A Study of Student Translation Strategies. In: Tirkkonen- Condity, Sonja (ed.): Empirical Research in Translation and Intercultural Studies. Tubingen, Germany: GuntereNarrVerlag.
• Van Leeuwen, T. (2004). Ten reasons why linguists should pay attention to visual communication. In P. LeVine, & R. Scollon (eds), Discourse and Technology: Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Washington, D. C.: Georgetown University Press, 7 – 19
• Van Someren, Maarten W.; Barnard, Yvonne F. and Sandberg, Jacobijn A. C. (1994): The Think Aloud Method: A Practical Guide to Modelling Cognitive Processes. London: Harcourt Brace & Company.
• Waddington, C. (2001). Different methods of evaluating student translations: The question of validity. Eurodite, 46(2), pp. 311-325.
• Weightman, B. (1987). Third World tour landscapes. Annals of Tourism Research, 14, 227- 239.