The features and functions of translated online tourism texts : the Singapore case

Abstract

With the rapid development of information technology, tourism websites have become one of the primary sources of first-hand travel information and a useful tool for travel planning. High quality translated Chinese online tourism texts help to promote Singapore tourism to Chinese travellers and help to enhance their travel experiences. This study attempts to examine the features and functions of translated online tourism texts, through an exploratory comparison of the translated Chinese texts with the English source texts. This thesis is a case study of 15 webpages extracted from Singapore Tourism Board’s VisitSingapore.com. The translated texts on the webpages are compared with the source texts to analyse their features and functions. From lexical aspect, the translated texts use positive adjectives, superlatives and purposefully selected words to convey tourism information. From syntactic aspect, the translated texts alter the sentence structures to produce more natural Chinese expressions. More importantly, cultural considerations are addressed in the process of translation. The translated texts adopt online features like hyperlinks to facilitate online reading. The translated Chinese texts fit well into online media. This study finds that the translated Chinese online tourism texts fulfil the same informative and vocative functions of the source texts. Some translation errors in the selected webpages are also identified with a tentative conclusion to suggest that future online tourism text translations may utilise more online features to enhance reading experiences and promotional functions.