Translating tourism promotional texts: Differences between the Finnish source text and its English translation in the article “Weekend in Tampere”

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to present analysis of a Finnish tourism promotional article and its translation and see what kinds of differences arise between the source and the target texts. As there were considerable variation between the texts, the changes that are analyzed in this thesis are limited to ones that have an impact on the contents or the message of the article.

My data is the article “Viikonloppu Tampereella” and its English translation “Weekend in Tampere” which are found on the Visit.Tampere webpage. The purpose of the articles is to promote short vacations in the city. As a method, I did a linguistic analysis of both articles and compared the results by highlighting the differences.

I contextualize my topic with theories of intercultural communication and tourism translation. The research background leans heavily on Sulaiman and Wilson’s studies of translation of tourism promotional texts. According to them, the object of tourism promotional texts is to attract tourists by creating a favorable destination image. Sulaiman and Wilson state that tourism translation must take into consideration the cultural differences between the source and target audiences to achieve this goal.

The results show that the English article is not a completely direct translation as there are several kinds of changes which have been categorized as omissions, additions, and replacements which occur from the level of single word choices to entire paragraphs. The most inconsistent element is modifiers, especially adjectives, which have arbitrarily been either kept, omitted, added, or replaced throughout the text. All in all, the English-speaking readers tend to receive less information of the destination compared to the readers of the original source text as there are many paragraphs which are not translated and parts containing information that have been omitted. The additions to the translation most of the time have an explanatory or marketing purpose. The translator has also made changes to personal constructions and expressed agency. The Finnish source text remains mostly distant from the reader and introduces things to see and do on a universal level while the English target text directly addresses the reader throughout the text. The English reader is also given more agency as the translated article is written from the point of view of the reader while the Finnish article emphasizes what Tampere has to offer to the visitor.

Some of the findings suggest that the translator has considered the new target culture and hence made changes to the translation. At the end, however, it is impossible to know whether all the differences were caused by the cultural differences between the source and target audiences, but the results may act as an inspiration to look more closely in the future how tourism texts are translated and changed to fit different cultures.