International tourism has increased in the modern era. However, low-quality translations of tourism promotional materials (TPMs) pose a serious challenge to tourism marketers and advertisers, who are competing to attract international tourists to their attractions. Thus, this book, written by Mohamed Zain Sulaiman and Rita Wilson, makes a valuable contribution to research in tourism translation and its practical aspects, which is of great benefit not only to researchers in the field of Translation Studies, Cultural Studies, and Cross-Cultural Communication, but also to stakeholders in the tourism and advertising industries.
The book is well-structured with ten chapters, categorised into two parts. Part one (Chapters 1-4) is concerned with theoretical aspects of translating tourism promotion. In Chapter 1, the authors introduce the notions of tourist motivation and industry persuasion and seek to answer two interrelated questions: “what motivates people to become tourists?” and “how does the industry persuade people to become tourists and choose one destination over another?”, drawing on Maslow’s psychological theory of the hierarchy of human needs. TPMs are defined in Chapter 2 as “a form of advertising in the field of marketing and described as the collection of media, such as brochures, leaflets, posters, flyers, postcards and websites” (17) used to support the sales of tourism products. In Chapter 3, the authors point out that the main causes behind the failure of TPM translation lie in translators’ limited knowledge of the art of persuasion and commissioners’ lack of awareness of cultural differences between markets and the advertising function of TPMs. Therefore, in Chapter 4, Sulaiman and Wilson propose a “cultural-conceptual translation (CCT) model” (55) that emphasises two macro-level factors, namely translation purpose and cultural conceptualisation, and view it as a method to achieve the TPM purpose.
Part two (Chapters 5-10) deals with the application and evaluation of the CCT model by adopting the English-Malay language combination as a case study. The authors identify seven cultural dimensions in which the Anglophone and Malay cultures differ significantly and select three key areas, namely landscapes, performancescapes, and stylescapes as the focus of the corpus analyses conducted in Chapter 6, Chapter 7 and Chapter 8, respectively. Tourism landscapes focuses on the tourist destination, and tourist performance is directly related to tourist activities. The specific stylistic features of TPMs are required to fit various tourism themes in different societies. The three scapes are analysed through textual analysis, CCT application and end-user testing. Findings from the textual analyses and the focus groups show that the Malay versions of the Australian TPMs fail to reconstruct an appealing destination image for the Malay target audience, mainly due to a failure to address the cultural-conceptual differences between the Anglophone and Malay cultures. Interestingly, the authors demonstrate that source texts which are retranslated drawing on the CCT model receive more positive responses from the target audience. In Chapter 9, based on the testing of the viability and effectiveness of the CCT model in a commercial-world setting with a focus on the interaction between commissioners and translators, the authors present some practical solutions based on interviews with commissioners from an Australian tourism authority and aim to close the gap between what might happen in the “ideal world” and what actually happens in the “real world.”
In the final Chapter, the authors provide CCT-based guidelines with regard to the translation process, translator prerequisites and the role of the commissioners. They suggest that translators should adopt a macro-top-down prospective approach to achieve the purpose of a translation, rather than focus on the translation of micro-linguistic elements. In addition to possessing knowledge of source and target cultures, the translators are also advised to establish a relationship with the commissioners, who “play a critical role by ensuring that their translators have a recognized professional qualification in translation” (214).
Although a culturally-oriented functional approach as adopted by the CCT model has been widely recognized in the field of advertising translation, hardly any studies have examined its application in the commercial context of tourism promotion. The book under review contributes to closing this gap. However, the identity of the translators involved in TPM translation should have been clarified. Translators are typically native speakers of the target language, but we would argue that it makes a difference if translators live in the source culture or in the country where the translated TPMs are to be disseminated. Translators who live and work in the target culture are better able to look at things from the recipients’ point of view and can more easily test the quality of their translation in the field before sending their target text back to the commissioner. Therefore, we suggest that it should be made clear what type of translators are involved in TPM translation.
In conclusion, despite the limitations, this book presents a CCT model that offers a platform to make TPM translation more streamlined and efficient. It is not only based on sound theoretical foundations, but also on professional practice. However, the book only considers the English-Malay language combination, and the application of the CCT model should be extended to other language combinations, for instance English-Chinese, since China has been leading global outbound travel since 2012 and has become one of the top five tourism destinations in the world.
Jie Jin
University of International Business and Economics, China
E-mail: jinjie0803@126.com
Jun Xu
University of International Business and Economics, China
E-mail: xujun289@163.com