Quality translation of hotel websites: interpersonal discourse and customer’s engagement

Abstract

This research points towards the need of a quality or “pragmatic” translation of hotel websites (Durán Muñoz, 2011), following the principle of localization (Pym, 2004; Dunne, 2006) and taking into account the interpersonal (interactional) discourse classification by Hyland and Tse (2004), in order to preserve the reader’s/customer’s persuasion. A sub-corpus of translated US and UK hotel websites from English into Spanish, obtained from COMETVAL (Corpus Multilingüe en Turismo, Universitat de València), has been analyzed following the Spanish interpersonal pattern for tourism genres (Mapelli, 2008; Suau-Jiménez, 2012a, 2012b). This study has been contrasted with a similar discursive analysis of hotel records in Spanish extracted from the Booking and TripAdvisor portals. Results suggest that a quality translation should not only include the necessary rhetorical functions but also the interpersonal discourse. Otherwise, persuasion and reader’s/customer’s engagement can be damaged, as happens with hotel records in the two analyzed portals. Also, the hotel’s specificity can be reduced as well as travellers’ increasing demand for engagement in hotel websites. Implications for the tourism industry suggest that hotels should increase  investments in the design and quality translation of their websites in order to reinforce hotels’ promotion. Besides, this study opens up a new research perspective related to the translation of promotion websites.