The Land of a Thousand Lakes as a Desirable Destination: How Finland is promoted to Finnish-, English- and French-speaking audiences

Abstract

This thesis studies tourism translation and how Finland is marketed abroad as a desirable travel destination. The aim of the study is to see what kind of imagery and thematics are used in the promotion of Finland and what kind of differences appear when Finnish tourism promotional articles are translated to English- and French-speaking target audiences. My research questions are: 1. What images are used to promote Finland, and do they differ between the Finnish, English and French articles? 2. What changes are made to tourism promotional texts when they are translated to English- and French-speaking target cultures?

Tourism is a fast-growing industry which operates in multilingual and multicultural environments as travel usually happens across language, culture, and country borders. Finland is actively taking part in the travel industry and tries to increase the number of both international and domestic tourists by improving its visibility and attractiveness as a travel destination. The study is contextualised by discussing the current state of the tourism industry and presenting an overview on statistics of tourism behaviour in Finland. As part of the societal context, the two tourism strategies drafted by the Finnish Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment, and a leading organisation in the tourism industry Visit Finland, are also presented which aim at growth in the tourism industry and set guidelines to tourism providers and marketers.

The theoretical framework of this thesis is based on the concept of culture, on the theory of cross-cultural communication, on the field of Imagology, and on studies on advertising conventions and tourism translation. The data consists of two Finnish tourism promotional articles dedicated to promoting Helsinki region and Lapland respectively and their translations to English and French. The method of this study is comparative textual analysis. The country images used in the selected tourism promotional articles are studied by examining the occurrences of national and regional unique selling points determined by Visit Finland. The textual differences are analysed by comparing the Finnish source text separately to its English and French counterparts. The observed differences were gathered and categorised as additions, deletions, and changes.

The results show that the selected tourism promotional articles follow closely the guidelines set by the Finnish authorities on how Finland and its specific regions should be marketed. There are no major differences between the language versions in regard to the images that are used in the promotion of Finland. There are, however, many differences in how the marketing is done on the textual level. Many additions, deletions, and changes are made in the translations compared to the source text which shows that decisions of what to include and exclude are made during the translation process. It can be interpreted that on a thematic level the translations follow the imagery of the source text closely, but on the textual level cultural differences on advertising conventions and register influence the translation choices.