CULTURE TRANSFER IN TOURISM TEXTS

Abstract

Tourism is considered the most important world industry of the 21st century. More and more people worldwide are travelling abroad. According to the United Nations World Travel Organisation (UNWTO), the number of registered international tourist arrivals rose to 1. 3 billion in 2017. Travelling becomes a solid foundation for encounters of cultures and intercultural communication between travellers, hosts and persons involved in tourism. The writing and translation of tourist texts – from travel guides to hotel information and menus – is of great importance in this sense. In the age of globalisation tourism texts are a particularly topical subject of translation. The translation of these texts requires special cultural and technical knowledge as well as special knowledge of the type of text. This article deals mainly with the problem of the transfer of culture-specific elements. The sample of the study consists of the German language versions of Turkish city guides. The work attempts to comment on the translations of culture-specific elements from a translation-theoretical point of view and to elaborate certain suggestions for translation practice.