Relevance and creativity as persuasive strategies to translate multimedia tourist material

Abstract

The notions of relevance and creativity are two key textual resources when promotional material is translated and, in particular, in the context of tourism. In the first case, relevance as a pragmatic principle helps ensure texts travel through different lands and audiences, posing challenges to translators, or language-and-culture experts, who use their expertise to opt for some content material or for format changes. Likewise, creativity is a highly demanded skill, given the nature of the process of (trans)creating advertising texts, especially audiovisual and multimedia ones, and considering the persuasive dimension of the process that takes place for these texts to cross cultural frontiers. In the paper these two principles will be theoretically presented, making special reference to promotional translation and international marketing, and a few real cases from international tourism campaigns will be analysed in order to draw some conclusions about the impact of these two principles for a better production of relevant and creative promotional texts in the field of tourism.