Business Tourism Texts

The aim of this chapter is to provide a classification of business tourism texts based on Kelly's taxonomy for general tourist texts. The authors include examples of each of them so that the reader can have a wider perspective of the kind of texts that they can find in this field. The authors specifically study texts that are part of the promotional material from the public and private sector with real examples to illustrate the study. This will help readers understand the kind of text they are referring to in order to set the basis of what they will find in the following chapters. Finally, a classification of texts that are informative for exhibitors and companies will be provided in general terms but will not be specifically studied to limit the scope of the practical cases and examples provided in the later on in the book.

Communication in Business Tourism

In this chapter, the authors adopt a corpus methodology to examine how business tourism promotional guides are written in their original language. Two examples (one in English and one in Spanish) are carefully examined according to a classification of verbal and non-verbal elements. First, the authors explain in the introduction the methodology of the study. They then continue with the analysis and description of the comparable corpus. Two promotional guides (one in English and one in Spanish) were selected for this purpose. For each of them, non-verbal elements are analyzed (fonts, text arrangement, symbols, images, colors) as well as verbal elements (voice, mode, types of sentences, verb tenses, adjectives, adverbs, personal pronouns, possessive determiners, and modal verbs).

Communication in Business Tourism

In this chapter the authors observe how the information from business tourism guides is translated from Spanish into English, that is, they present the analysis of the source texts (ST) and target texts (TT), also known as parallel corpus. They start with an explanation of the methodology adopted for our study. Then, as they did in the previous chapter during the first stage of their analysis (original versions of English and Spanish business tourist guides), they divide their study into two main groups: (1) non-verbal elements and (2) verbal elements. As previously done, they also include a set of examples for every category analyzed.

Tourist Texts and Discourse

The designation “tourist texts” includes a wide variety of documents, and in order to set their characteristics it is necessary to study the different authors that have observed and analyzed this field of linguistic research. In this chapter, the authors first complete a study of the existent classifications and the discursive conventions of these texts. They start with the definition and characteristics of tourist texts. Before continuing with a classification of tourist texts, they review some of the controversies, problems, and issues derived from the attempt to classify them. Then, they provide a definition of some of the main texts from the business tourism field such as promotional material from the public and the private sector, informative texts for tourists, and operational texts. Finally, they reflect on tourism discourse, and they study the formal features of tourist texts to set the basis of the practical chapters that will follow in the book.

Business Tourism

This chapter opens with a review of some general definitions of the concept of business tourism in order to set the basis of what the authors will be talking about in this book. This will also allow them to provide their own definition of the concept and be specific to the reader as to what they are referring to. They continue with more definitions of key concepts in the field. Then a section on the importance of business tourism will follow in which they analyze some examples of the promotion of countries as potential destinations for events. Next, some specific figures of the growth of business tourism in different countries will be given, and the advantages that business tourism has for them will be explained. This will lead to the final sections of the chapter on the importance of communication in different languages for the successful development of business tourism and some useful language-related resources to facilitate business tourism communication.

Paratexts in the Translation of Tourism Texts

This chapter considers Gérard Genette's concept of “paratext” from a translational approach. Based on the previous research carried out by different authors in the field of Translation Studies, the author uses the idea of the paratext and applies it to the specific case of the translation of business tourism texts. More specifically, this chapter discusses the alterations and adaptations that are performed in elements such as images, the menus of websites, or the layout of the information when the contents are translated into a different language. In addition, it will be necessary to understand the social, cultural, or economic limitations that influence this adaptation for an international public. To do so, after a review of the literature on this topic, the text carries out a comparison between two websites in Spanish and English and includes specific examples that will be discussed based on the premises presented here.

Practical Cases

In the following sections you will find practical cases to apply the theory explained in the previous chapters. Complete the activities checking all the different examples that were included throughout the book. These will help you understand the strategies that are used in business tourism texts in English and Spanish in order to enhance your communication skills in both languages. In the first practical case, you will be asked to identify the main features of the text following the model of analysis explained in previous chapters. In the second one, you will be asked to identify the strategies used in the translation of a business tourism text. In the third one, you will be asked to create your own guide. In the fourth one, you will be asked to compare extracts to explain the strategies used in the translation of a text. Finally, you will work on the translation of a text following these strategies.

Strategies of Transference to Translate Promotional Guides From the Business Tourist Sector

The aim of this chapter is to present a proposal of transference strategies in order to identify and describe, from a translation point of view, the most frequently used strategies in the translation of the guidebooks from the business tourist sector. This will be very useful to compare communication features between English and Spanish and to ultimately enhance translation practice. The term that the authors will use to designate the translator's performance when faced with the translation of lexical elements of the promotional guides of the business tourism sector will be “transfer strategy.” The choice of this term lies mainly in the fact that most of the authors of the existing literature relate the term “strategy” to “problem.” On the other hand, the use of the term “strategy” instead of “operation” lies in the commonness of the term. The authors believe that the term “transfer strategy” is the one that best reflects the solutions that must be taken during the translation task of these promotional guides.