Translating Promotional Tourist Websites: Balancing the Informative and the Appellative Functions

The present study examines new practices of translating tourist websites. It studies the extent to which translation can optimise communication between communities, extend the potentials of the web and develop its promotional function. For data collection, the study depends on six tourist websites, of which four websites are translated from English into Arabic; whereas two of them are translated from Arabic into English. A comparative corpus research between the translated texts will be constructed, focusing on the linguistic and extra-linguistic elements in the websites. The research starts with the structural features of the tourist websites. It studies their role in constructing an effective web communication, and having given rise to a new cyber genre. Then, it proceeds to investigate the linguistic features of the tourist websites, and how they were treated in translation. Finally, the role of culture is researched in the translation of these websites of global hospitality. The study draws the conclusion that tourist websites have developed into a genre per se. This genre has distinctive linguistic features that do not cause a high level of difficulty in translation. However, the translation of these features becomes more challenging when a word's morphology and syntactic structure within the genre is used for a specific function. Moreover, the study investigated the stylistic devices repeatedly used in the genre. It found that translating the humorous parts and the acoustic elements are the most challenging texts to transfer from one language to another. The final chapter examines the concept that web translation requires adequate knowledge of the cultural contexts of the source and target languages. Utterances need to be accurately transferred from their source context to target one. Accordingly, translation strategies resorted to are expected to achieve the overall translation purpose and make available the socio-cultural preferences of the target audience.