Cultural Mediation in Tourism Translation: Saudi Arabia as a Case Study

Abstract

Part of the recent Saudi National Transformation program Vision 2030 is the significant growth of the tourism sector. Opening up the country to international tourists means facilitating access to Saudi culture through translation, where the role of translators as cultural mediators is salient. In the Saudi context, cultural mediation in tourism translation is an under-researched topic. This paper addresses the following question: What is interventionst role of translators as cultural mediators and where do they position the tourist against Arabic-English translated Culture-Specific Items (CSIs) in Saudi-related tourism articles? Drawing on Kwieciński’s (2001) adaption of Venuti’s domestication and foreignization (1995), this study adopts a descriptive approach to analyze the translation strategies in a parallel corpus of Arabic and English articles published on the official website of Saudi tourism Visit Saudi. The findings reveal the active role of translators in providing access to the Saudi culture by extensively adopting the exoticization and explanation strategies in tourism texts to foreignize CSIs, especially in the contexts of traditions and food. This paper, thus, bridges the scholarly gap in Translation Studies by examining cultural mediation in translating tourism texts about Saudi Arabia, focusing on translators’ strategies and how they position Saudi CSIs in the international tourism industry.