| dc.description.abstract | My research addresses intercultural communication in the field of travel and the industry of tourism and the challenges faced by translators between cultures. In my thesis I explore selected texts about foreign travel in English and in Russian and their Russian and English translations (respectively) in order to show the importance of differentiating between the ways in which translators, travellers and tourists represent and contrast foreign and domestic elements. In Chapters One and Two, I explore target-oriented and source-oriented translations. My analysis suggests that target-oriented translation can be creatively combined with source-oriented translation, both on a semantic level, by translators of travel texts and on a narrative level, by those travellers who write accounts of their experiences. Thus translators of travel literature create a holistic image of a foreign culture using analogies familiar to readers of the target language. My comparisons of English-language The Lonely Planet and Rough Guides travel guides to China, Finland and Russia with their Russian translations suggest that texts targeted at different audiences can be significantly divergent in terms of content. Translators take different approaches not only in their use of target-oriented and source-oriented translations, but also in the degree of creativity and adaptation/localization which they employ. My analysis of articles from British Cereal magazine and their Russian translations, which I study in Chapter Three of my thesis, shows that creativity may be a legitimate aspect of translation strategy, or an attempt by publishers to alter the original text radically in order to make it more appealing to the target audience. In Chapter Four, I focus my analysis of online texts for tourists on Condé Nast Traveller magazine and the Booking.Com website (both English and Russian versions) in order to establish why localization experts replace translators. My thesis concludes that the role of the translator in the travel industry encompasses a spectrum of linguistic and extra-linguistic tasks based on connections between foreign and domestic values, including strategies of localization and adaptation. | en_GB |
