Translating Destination Images as a Re-presentation of Multiple Identities: Comparing the Chinese-to-English Translations of Four Tourism Websites Chung-yan Kong Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures The University of Edinburgh 2011 DECLARATION I hereby declare that the work presented in this thesis, which I submit for assessment on the programme of study leading to the award of Doctor of Philosophy, is my own and has not been taken from the work of others except where such work has been cited and/or acknowledged within the text of my work. None of the work herein has been submitted in candidature for any other degree or professional qualification. Chung-yan Kong _______________________ 12 April, 2011 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I owe my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Şebnem Susam-Sarajeva, whose insightful criticism, meticulous guidance and unconditional support have been of tremendous benefit to my research experience and my work. I also wish to thank Bonnie McDougall for her valuable guidance and support during the earliest stage of my study, and Marion Winters for helping me improve my methodology and focus on some important issues in discourse analysis. I am particularly indebted to Sheila Edward for helping me with proofreading, and to colleagues in my workplace, the Centre for Research in Education, Inclusion and Diversity in the Moray House School of Education, for their moral support while completing this thesis. I would like to thank all of my friends and family in Edinburgh and Hong Kong, for their support in any respect during the completion of the project. Last but not least, I am grateful for my Heavenly Father for helping me gain both wisdom and knowledge in Him, and allowing me to experience His protection as my refuge, His amazing love and abundance. Chung-yan Kong iii 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. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT........................................................................ iii ABSTRACT............................................................................................... iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS .................................................................. xi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ..........................................................1 1.1 Research objectives................................................................................................. 1 1.1.1 Initial motivations ....................................................................................... 2 1.1.1.1 Website translations from a self perspective......................................... 2 1.1.1.2 Website translations as manifestations of political or economic power.................................................................. 5 1.1.1.3 Multiple identities re-presented by website translations....................... 6 1.1.2 Expected outcomes 1.1.2.1 To raise awareness of the existence of power discourse....................... 7 1.1.2.2 To provide an alternative perspective to study the translation of pragmatic texts ...................................................................................... 8 1.2. The four case studies and the data sets.................................................................... 9 1.2.1 Selecting website components: the destination section ............................ 11 1.2.1.1 Core components................................................................................. 11 1.2.1.2 Part of destination sub-sections excluded ........................................... 13 1.2.2 Language versions selected....................................................................... 15 1.2.3 Synchronic comparison............................................................................. 16 1.3 Research questions................................................................................................ 19 1.4 Concluding remarks .............................................................................................. 21 CHAPTER 2: AN INTEGRATED THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND A TWO-STAGE COMPARATIVE METHOD ............22 2.1 Introduction........................................................................................................... 22 2.2 Translating tourism websites as a localisation strategy?....................................... 22 2.2.1 Website translation as part of website localisation ................................... 23 v 2.2.2 Website translation apart from website localisation.................................. 28 2.2.2.1 Irregular ways of adapting non-verbal contents.................................. 29 2.2.2.2 Unspecified Internet users................................................................... 34 2.3 An integrated theoretical framework 2.3.1 Studying translation as an act of self-representation................................. 38 2.3.1.1 The concept of self writing and re -presentation.................................. 38 2.3.1.2 A need to generalise oneself as a “website owner”............................. 44 2.3.2 Merits of using an integrated approach..................................................... 46 2.3.2.1 Compatibility between the frameworks .............................................. 47 2.3.2.2 Applicability to this research .............................................................. 50 2.4 The core methodology for a two-stage comparison in three dimensions of the website contexts.......................................................... 57 2.4.1 The first-stage comparison........................................................................ 57 2.4.1.1 Identifying re-presented features of tourism, organisational and domestic discourses .............................................. 57 2.4.1.2 Why is a quantitative analysis not appropriate?.................................. 63 2.4.1.3 Discourse features possible for a source text-target text comparison ................................................... 70 2.4.2 The second-stage comparison ................................................................... 72 2.5 Concluding remarks .............................................................................................. 73 CHAPTER 3: COMMODIFYING TOURISM IN THE SHARED SELF-REPRESENTATION CONTEXT...................76 3.1 Contextualising the general context of situation of the website translations........ 76 3.1.1 The field of discourse................................................................................ 77 3.1.2 The tenor of discourse............................................................................... 78 3.1.3 The mode of discourse .............................................................................. 79 3.2 Discourses dominant in the common context ....................................................... 81 3.2.1 Tourism discourse ..................................................................................... 81 3.2.2 Consumerism and commodity advertising in tourism discourse .............. 82 3.2.3 The dominant discourses and the concept of re -presentation