A Study of Translation Problems of Tourism Industry Guidebooks: An Error Analysis Perspective

Subject Areas :

Hossein Vahid Dastjerdi ¹ , Saleh Delforouz Abdolmaleki ²

1 - Associate Prof., English Department, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran
2 - MA in Translation Studies, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran

Received: 2011-11-12 Accepted : 2012-01-12 Published : 2013-03-01

Keywords: tourism, pragmatics, translation, tourist guidebook, Error analysis,

Abstract :

This study was motivated by the researchers’ goal to unfold the quality of the English translations of Persian tourism industry texts and discover the most frequent error patterns the Iranian non-native translators have committed in such texts. Thus, the following research questions were addressed: 1) Are the English versions of Persian tourist guidebooks and multimedia compact discs provided by Iranian translators appropriate in terms of syntax, semantics and pragmatics?, and 2) What are the possible patterns of the errors found in English translations of Persian tourist guidebooks? To answer these questions, three English tourist guidebooks translated from their Persian source texts into English by Iranian translators as well as two multimedia compact discs whose primary purpose was to introduce Isfahan tourist attractions in English were selected and carefully studied. Three hundred sentences were randomly extracted and subjected to error analysis. The results of the analysis indicated that over one-third of the total number of the sentences under study were syntactically, semantically or pragmatically erroneous. Thus, based on the proposed model of the study which was a combination of American Translation Association's (ATA, 2010) error identification categories and Keshavarz’s (1993) linguistic taxonomy of errors, the most frequent errors were identified and statistically tabulated. Most of the syntactic errors came to belong to ‘grammar’ pattern, most semantic errors to ‘terminology, word choice’ pattern , most pragmatic errors to ‘mistranslation into target language’ error pattern, and most translation-specific errors were found to have an ‘Incomplete Passage’ pattern

References:

Abbasi, M. (2003).  Kish five star international hotels. M.A. thesis, University of Shahid Beheshti, Iran.

American Heritage, eds. (1996). The American heritage book of English Usage: a practical and authoritative guide to contemporary English.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Ap, J. and Wong, K. K. F. (2001).  Case study on tour guiding: professionalism, issues and problems. Tourism Management, 22, 551-563.

ATA (2010). American Translation Association, www.atanet.org. Accessed 20^th of July 2010, at 11:30.

Baer, B. and Koby, G. S. (2003). Beyond the Ivory Tower: Rethinking translation pedagogy 

American Translators Association Scholarly Monograph Series XII 2003. xvi, 259.

Baker, M. (1992). In other words: a course book on translation. London: Sage Publicatio Brown, H. D. (1994). Teaching by principles: interactive language teaching methodology. New York: Prentice Hall Regents.

Dann, G. (1996). The language of tourism: a sociolinguistic perspective. UK: CAB International Dehestani, B. (2004). Tourism planning: the case study of Astara. M.A. thesis, University of Tarbiat Modares, Iran.

Gentile, J. R. (1997). Educational psychology (2nd ed.). Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company.

Goeldner, Ritchie, B. and McIntosh. (2000). Tourism: Principles, practices and philosophies (8th Ed.). New York: Wiley

Halliday (1985). An introduction to functional grammar. London: Baltimore; Md., USA: Edward Arnold, 1985. 

Hendrickson, J. M. (1979). Evaluating spontaneous communication through systematic error analysis. Foreign Language Annals,12 (5), 357-64.

Jamshidi, M. (2003). The investigation of determining factors on domestic tourism in Hamadan province . M .A. thesis, Isfahan University of Technology

Keshavarz, M. H. (1993). Contrastive analysis and error analysis. Tehran: Rahnama Publications.

Khayri El-Sharkawy, O. (2007). Exploring knowledge and skills for tourist guides: evidence from Egypt. Tourismos: an international multidisciplinary journal of tourism, 2, 77-94.

Leclerc, D. and Martin, J. N. (2004). Tour guide communication competence: french, German and American tourists' perceptions. International journal of intercultural relations, 181-200.

MacLeod, N. D., Nelson, B. S., McIvor, J. G., and Corfield, J. P. (2009). Wet season resting – economic insights from scenario modeling. The Rangeland Journal, 31, 143–150.

Milton, J. and Garbi, A. (2000). Error types in the computer-aided translation of tourism texts. Washington, DC: IEEE Computer Society.

Mahmoodi, S. (2007).  An error analysis approach to translating Persian commercial texts into English: a pedagogical perspective. M.A. thesis, University of Isfahan.

Miremadi. A. (1991). Theories of translation and interpretation. Tehran: Samt.

Nouri, Z. A. (2007). Iran, Isfahan province, the investment prospects. Isfahan: Elmafarin.

Richards, J., Platt, J. and Platt, H. (1992). Dictionary of language teaching and applied linguistics. Essex: Longman.

Shayesteh, M. and Ghasemi, M. (2004). Isfahan, a small but earthly paradise. Isfahan: Naghsh-e-Khorshid.

Vakilzadeh, D. (2006).  Isfahan, resplendence of beauty. Isfahan: Mirdashti.

Merriam-Webster (1984). Webster's new dictionary of synonyms: a dictionary of discriminated synonyms with antonyms and analogous and contrasted words. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster.

Merriam-Webster (1994). The Merriam-Webster dictionary of synonyms and antonyms. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster.

WTO (2007). World Tourism Organization.. Accessed 10th of July 2010, at 10:30.

Yazdani, M. (2004). Design of Tous cultural tourism complex. M.A. thesis, University of Gilan.