websites and localization 網(wǎng)絡(luò)旅游文本的翻譯和歸.pdf

1 To appear in Baicchi A ed forthcoming Voices on Translation RILA Rassegna Italiana di Linguistica Applicata Roma Bulzoni Editore The translation of tourism related websites and localization problems and perspectives Gloria Cappelli Universit di Pisa L articolo affronta alcune questioni poste dalla traduzione di siti internet con particolare riferimento alla traduzione del contenuto testuale di siti turistici Molti sono i problemi aperti in questo settore che ha iniziato a suscitare l attenzione degli studiosi solo di recente e che spaziano dalla natura dei generi testuali del web fino alla distinzione fra traduzione e localizzazione dal ruolo del traduttore di contenuti ipermediali al problema di valutare la qualit del prodotto finale La complessa problematica esemplificata attraverso lo studio delle parole chiave in un corpus di testi di argomento turistico che fornisce la base su cui fondare alcune proposte per la ricerca futura 1 Introduction Over the years Translation Studies have evolved with the evolution of media The rich scientific debate derived from the obstacles with which practitioners and scholars are faced on a daily basis has led to remarkable insights and positive advancements both in translation theory and practice The technological advances in the computer sciences of the past few years and the increasing circulation of multimedia and hypermedia have provided Translation Studies research with new thorny questions and new knots to untie Much attention has been devoted to the translation of audiovisual texts both in terms of dubbing and subtitling Gambier 1994 Heiss and Bollettieri Bosinelli 1996 Pavesi 2005 Bruti 2007 and to the translation of CD ROMs and other multimedia materials Agorni 2000 Gambier and Gottlieb 2001 Computer assisted translation is also widely discussed Quah 2006 especially by reason of the growth of the Internet and the consequent often mentioned globalization which makes geographical and cultural boundaries 2 thinner and thinner In such a world Bassnett 2002 10 claims the significance of translators work as well as the debate about crucial issues are destined to grow steadily Despite the author s insightful remark however and despite the fact that the web has indeed expanded and that the number of non English speaking users is steadily growing web content translation has not as yet received a systematic treatment Translators for the web cannot rely on the amount of theoretical support on which translators of literary or technical texts can rely Nor does there seem to be any clear criteria to assess the quality of web translations and yet in a world where some businesses depend predominantly upon their presence on the World Wide Web a good translation of the content of their websites is often responsible for their successes and failures Tourism related businesses certainly fall into this category of industries but nevertheless many websites are badly translated The following sections tackle some questions relative to web translation in particular to the translation of the textual content of tourist websites The purpose of this article is not to provide clear cut answers but to raise questions and to encourage the discussion on this topic 2 From web promotion to linguistic research It is widely acknowledged that the evolution of the Internet has brought about some significant changes in the way in which people interact and carry out their business In most fields and especially in the tourism industry where the main goal is to encourage hundreds of thousands of people to travel throughout the globe a good or a bad website can make the difference Even more so if we consider that according to a research carried out by Global Market Insite Inc in 18 countries in 2005 though up to 70 of the informants affirmed that they booked their holidays online and these figures are destined to grow Another research project carried out in Germany on several banks websites Stein 2006 has revealed that the linguistic quality of the website is perceived iconically in line with the supposed quality of the business or service offered 3 For those interested in language and translation these facts represent the tip of an iceberg as they urge linguists to tackle some fundamental questions relative to the language used on websites to the status of online texts to the nature and quality of the translation for a particular medium the web and for a specialized domain tourism and last but not least to the role and training of translators 3 How do we know when a translation is good House 2001 opens with this question and continues writing that p 243 it lies at the heart of all concerns with translation criticism It is certain that objectifying the quality of translation is not easy House 1997 1998 2001 distinguishes three main approaches to meaning which in turn determine three different approaches to translation evaluation mentalist approaches presupposing the view of meaning as residing in the user s head response based approaches that is behaviouristic and functionalist approaches in which the most relevant criteria are either the reader s reaction to the translated text e g Nida s dynamic equivalence principle or the respect of the function of the source text e g Reiss and Vermeer s Skopostheorie and text and discourse based approaches such as Toury sDescriptiveTranslationStudiesandotherlinguistically oriented approaches such as House s proposal itself in which translation is in the end text re contextualisation House s model adopts the concept of equivalence and presupposes the analysis and comparison of an original text and its translation text on three different levels Language Text Register and Genre facilitating correlation of internal linguistic textual features and external contextual features 2007 The translated text TT must have a function equivalent to that of the source text ST and this requires a cultural filter House 2001 that is a sort of adaptation of the translated text to make up for socio cultural stylistic and rhetorical differences among the ST and the TT 4 From the studies in translation quality several suggestions about the relevant aspect for the analysis of web translation emerge the genre and the function of our texts the subject and the linguistic features of the text itself the channel and the nature and relations of the participants Far from being an easy task any attempt to apply the model to tourism related web content immediately unveils further complex questions that await an answer 4 Web content new genres or just a new medium for the old genres For the purpose of the present discussion I endorse the definition of genre put forward by Taylor Torsello 1999 which sees it as a culture dependent abstraction a generalization made by people who belong to the same culture on the basis of their experience of texts and contexts For a long time web pages have been considered as sorts of online brochures or the electronic version of traditional printed genres Cappelli 2006 The lively debate of the past few years though has contributed to bring to the fore several distinctive structural and linguistic features of the textual contents published online Biber 2004 Santini 2006 Stein 2006 which make it possible to consider websites as the locus of new genres and not just as a new way to present old information 4 1 The structure and textuality of web pages If genres are socially ratified text types in a community Kress and Threadgold 1988 quoted in Taylor Torsello 1999 which come with a conventional structure easily recognizable by the members of that culture web pages can definitely be considered as a macro genre Despite the structural differences between the different sub genres of web documents e g blogs portals company websites discussion forums etc and the differences derived from the creative work of web developers and web designers all websites and their pages have common and recognizable features e g title bar navigation main content area etc which are now conventionalized1and easily recognized by web users 5 Websites are mutlidimensional and language plays a fundamental role at all levels of their structure Text is not only present in the main body of the page but also in the navigation systems and in source code which lies beneath the surface Some of the textual elements included in the latter are not perceivable at the surface level but are indeed visible to search engines e g Google Web documents defy any traditional view of the text Much has been said about hypertextuality and its characteristics The linearity of text in its literal sense dissolves since the reader chooses his path and builds his subjective linearity online Entry and exit pages solely determined by the user s choices replace beginning and end Coherence relations become the fundamentals in which the whole hypertext is grounded links are created following conceptual connections relating different texts and act as cohesive devices which keep web discourse together Web textuality is dynamic and interactive Textual content can be automatically adjusted to the preferences of the readers e g multilingual websites can present the content in a preferred language and continually modified by multiple authors so that it can be considered as a collective product to which different professionals contribute by reason of its multidimensionality The technological aspects contribute to the complexity of web textuality since language plays a fundamental role in the source code as well this latter includes linguistic hints about the content of the web pages in the form of keywords key phrases and full sentences or short texts These elements contribute to determine the website ranking in the results of search engines and consequently the visibility of the information presented For this reason each web page should be considered as a harmonious whole since it is a sort of container from where the reader picks up information s he needs and therefore artificially separating what is considered to be the main body from the rest is an arbitrary operation and it would not make sense in many cases In sum web pages tend to be more complex and more mixed than traditional paper or electronic documents Santini 2006 67 68 6 4 2 The language of web promotion in tourist websites Taylor Torsello 1999 points out how the different roles of the participants the communicative goals and the medium cannot but result in significant differences in the way in which texts are built Given the importance of quality content and the technical requirements for an effective functioning of websites some of the features of promotional English become more pronounced as is evident in the choice and distribution of keywords Cappelli 2006 The limited space allowed to advertisements by some portals for instance results in increasing lexical and expressive conciseness and in the widespread use of premodification as a form of relative clause reduction Gotti 2006 Several verbal techniques typical of promotional tourism discourse in order to persuade lure woo and seduce millions of human beings Dann 1996 2 are commonly found such as an abundant use of adjectives and of emphatic language language euphoria the frequent use of the imperative mood and of the formulae of direct address to the reader ego targeting common collocations meant to satisfy the personal and cultural expectations of potential customers and to describe an attraction by resorting to certain sociolinguistic perspectives e g authenticity strangerhood etc and topics key words The importance of keywords in the language of the web is one of the most interesting phenomena for linguists and translators alike and the lexical level of online content provides a good vantage point for some observations on the nature and quality of web translation 5 How is this of interest for linguists and translators If as House 2001 says when we translate we need to consider the genre and the function the subject and the linguistic features of the text the channel and the nature and relations of the participants web translation gives us food for thought 7 Websites can be described in terms of genres given at least the structural textual and linguistic peculiarities described above The subject can vary considerably of course As far as tourism related websites are concerned this point raises further questions First is there such a thing as the language of tourism Dann 1996 seems to prove that indeed there is and that it has specific features and modes Second is there only one type of language of tourism Everyday experience tells us that the language of tourism is a multifaceted multidisciplinary type of discourse which draws on several specific domains such as art architecture eco talk etc Fodde and Denti 2005 Nigro 2006 Vestito 2005 yet another aspect that adds complexity to the translation process Third can tourism English be considered as a type of specialized discourse such as medical English or computer English Recent studies Gotti 2006 Nigro 2006 Cappelli 2006 seem to agree that tourism English can be recognized as a type of specialized discourse displaying different levels of specialization associated with different types of texts that address a more or less specialized audience As for the linguistic features of web content there is still much work to be done in order to analyze all the aspects of interest for the linguist Certainly the structural constraints of web genres bring about interesting phenomena at the linguistic level Some of them have been touched upon in section 4 2 a few more will be considered in the next section where the question of keywords will be dealt with Translators need of course to be familiar with the most relevant linguistic features of websites and web pages not only at the discursive and pragmatic level but also at the semantic syntactic and morphological level As far as the channel is concerned the web is in a continuous evolution and challenges every clear cut distinction between the oral and written system Much research is still needed on the influence of virtual media on textuality As for the participants questions arise relative to the nature of the source text e g was it meant to be translated and of its author e g just one author or many The receivers are global readers they come from all over the world they have very diverse cultures interests values and for most of them 8 English is not an L1 Moreover visitors arrive at a website by searching for specific keywords or key phrases building their own unique path through the web and as potential tourists they come with dreams that need to be wrapped up and sold back to them which is what promotion does Translators also need to take into account this complex interplay of attitudes Bertuccelli Papi 2000 and language idiosyncrasies when they sit down to translate for the web 6 Is web translation a type of specialized translation Focus on the lexicon As a direct consequence of the multidimensionality of the documents to be translated website content translation is a type of specialized translation that requires special skills and competences at various levels On the linguistic level translators have to deal both with the technicalities in the broadest possible sense of the language of tourism and with the strategies required by the promotional aim of the text On the technical level translators must keep in mind the requirements imposed by the need to optimize web content for search engine rankings 6 1 The fundamental role of keywords in promotional tourist websites Keywords and key phrases are essential in search engine ranking and as a consequence on occasion the text is almost exclusively made up of them to the extent that the actual message is repetitive and inadequately informative Lists of synonyms are provided with slight variations to ensure the presence on the page of all the variants of the same search phrase for a given item Thus web content has generally a higher concentration of keywords and key phrases than printed promotional material Italian villa rentals hotels and vacation accommodation self catering homes holiday rentals apartments farmhouse holidays bed and breakfasts they re all here with maps images and local information Direct contact we re not an agency a wealth of detail and an enormous choice Whether you want to rent an Italian villa apartment castle or holiday rental cottage or you re looking for a hotel or guest house start at 9 Websites which target English speaking countries will probably include as in this case key phrases which are identical in meaning but belong to different varieties of English such as vacation house Am vs holiday home Br 2 The usage of keywords and keying are common techniques of the language of tourism Dann 1996 Keywords are meant to fire imagination while mirroring the consumer and therefore they must be part of the consumer s language so as to allow the potential tourists to recognize themselves In order to be effective they must be short clear and current This applies even more so when the language has to fulfill the web medium requirements i e search engine optimization that is to say when they must actually be the very same ones tourists would use to describe what is being sought after Keywords are generally concentrated at the beginning of the page as the first paragraph of a web page content is valued more than the rest of the text Several factors concur to this First of all the English speaking world writing style is traditionally grounded in the so called five paragraph essay and the first one is the most important in that it has to grab the reader s attention by informing him or her of the main points of the essay Since search engines are biased towards the English language as the vast majority of online texts are in English they also assume that people who write in English will follow this style and therefore that the fi