Analysing the Thai to English Translations of Tourism Discursive Elements in the Tourism Authority of Thailand’s English Webpages

Abstract

With its tourism industry becoming the main source of income of the country, Thailand has put an emphasis on promoting tourist destinations to foreign tourists via different channels including online resources. The Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT), a state agency in charge of tourism promotion, provides useful information of attractions in Thai and other languages on their webpages. This paper attempts to analyse the tourism discursive elements as posited by Durán Muñoz (2012) and Dann (1996) in the English version of the TAT webpages on Bangkok and to analyse how these components are translated. The study found few uses of the tourism language characteristic in the translated version as the result of the moderate uses of these constituents and the exclusion of certain Thai texts in the translation. The investigation also found that these linguistic tools are both literally translated and adapted. While the original meaning is preserved by literal translation, adaptation tends to heighten the tourism discourse quality in the translated text yet alters the original meaning.