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

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.

The present study was carried out to reveal the nature of errors and strategies in Persian translations of English tourism brochures. To do so, it focused on an error analysis of translated tourism brochures. As Taylor (1975) points out, researchers are interested in errors because they are believed to contain valuable information about the strategies that people use to acquire language. In this paper it is argued that for translations of tourist brochures to enhance the tourist’s experience, translations should not be literal but multidimensional i.e. culturally sensitive to their target audience and based on theories now available in translation studies. Thus, regardless of the accuracy of a translation, if the norms of the target community are overlooked it is a poor translation.
The translation of information that tourist destinations provide to their visitors is an important factor in effective tourism communication. The types of translation strategies and problems in the information of brochures, however, are under-researched in the tourism literature and there is little discussion of tourism material in translation research. The focus in the literature tends to be on the quality of translation in a literal sense. Crucially, tourism is a cultural experience (Bryce, MacLaren, & O’Gorman, 2013) and as such effective communication must be sensitive to cultural issues (Ryan & Gu, 2010). Within tourism research, there are few studies which address the errors and strategies in translating travel brochures. Thus, the current research is an attempt to fill a part of this gap.

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