PROCEDURES IN TRANSLATING CULTURE-RELATED ELEMENTS IN TOURISM DISCOURSE

Abstract

This paper applies descriptive methods for yielding results on (the frequency of) translation procedures employed in translating tourism-oriented websites from Serbian into English. Since the tourism industry forcefully encourages culture-mediated communication, the aim of this paper was to perform an analysis of translation strategies applied to cope with specific cultural concepts detected on the Internet websites of official tourist organizations of three major cities in Serbia. The analytic framework was grounded in a critical approach to concrete examples and translators’ suggestions. The research stages included data collection, classification, and analysis and the preferred translation procedures were noted down. The paper also tried to decide to what extent the need for linguistic accuracy was replaced by a requirement for cultural sensitivity since not only do cultural implications for translation include lexical content and syntax, but they also comprise ideologies, history and ways of life in a given culture. By providing the projection of dominant procedures used in translating culture-specific items in tourism discourse, this linguistic perspective hopes to offer both the deeper insight into lexical system of the two languages and the guidelines to translators when solving such challenges during translation process.