Translating destination images as a re-presentation of multiple identities: comparing the Chinese-to-English translations of four tourism websites
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Date
01/07/2011Author
Kong, Chung-yan
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Abstract
This thesis argues that website translations can be taken as a form of social control
striving to achieve certain political or economic ends by the website owners from a
self-representation perspective. Studying the Chinese-to-English translations of the
destination sections in four tourism websites, this study aims to derive interpretations
as to how the act of translating formulates multiple self-representations, which may
be seen as ideological attempts to influence the perceptions of target-text audiences.
This thesis has two main parts. The first, Chapters 1 and 2, outlines the research
objectives, background information and the conceptualisation of the four cases, and a
two-stage comparative method working within an integrated theoretical framework.
The second part, Chapters 3 to 5, comprises the empirical findings, discussing how
features of discourses hypothetically prominent in a particular dimension of the
website context may come to manifest different identities of the website owners. The
translation strategies for these features are examined to identify the aspects of these
identities changed in the self-representation contexts.
Chapter 3 hypothesizes that the common context of the websites is dominated
by tourism discourse and other associated discourses. The translation strategies for
discourse features expressing a set of shared identities of the website owners suggest
that the concepts of consumerism and commodity advertising are re-formulated in
the translations. Chapters 4 and 5 discuss further identities of the owners manifested
in the diverging sub-contexts of the websites, and underline aspects of these
identities foregrounded in the translations. Chapter 4 highlights the diverging
organisational identities of the official and corporate websites. The translation
strategies for certain organisational features show that different organisational
stances, different beneficiaries and different business rivals of the two categories of
websites are emphasised in the translations. Studying the identity of being ‘Chinese
people’ formulated by certain re-presented features of local discourse, Chapter 5
points to the differences between the national images re-presented by the China
websites and the regional images foregrounded by the HK websites in their
translations. Finally, the conclusions summarize various notions relating to the
multiple identities re-formulated in the self-representation context, as well as their
economic and political implications