What you need to know about translating for tourism
One branch of translation includes translating for tourism. Those who do it often say that it’s rather enjoyable, given that it grants you opportunity to not only be creative, but to also accumulate a wealth of knowledge about different cultures as well. What’s more, the information that you gain from translating for that next vacation plan can be invaluable.
While translating for tourism can seem easier and more fun than other branches of translation due to its lack of technical structure, that’s not to say that it doesn’t carry its own set of challenges. You have to be familiar with the culture framework of the topic you’re translating, and thus work accordingly. The reason: the tourism sector encompasses everything from air travel, hospitality, and history to sports and gastronomy.
Being specific about description
It goes without saying that tourism texts are descriptive. Translators must be able to capture the essence of that and transfer that into the target language. They must be able to draw equivalents between Turkish and the source language. If they fail to do this, they might end up not only mistranslating the text, but also misguiding the reader as well.
Translating without travelling
Writing about a place in your mother tongue that you’ve never been to and that you can’t visualize is difficult enough. Doing that in foreign language, hence, is twice as difficult! Translating texts that particularly ambiguous is, of course, all the more mind-bending. To counter this, the translator ought to draw from multiple resources.
Cultural colour
Tourism texts are, more often than not, peppered with cultural colour. One thus should be extra sensitive when attempting to re-create that. At times, it may even be impossible to render certain things into Turkish. This holds particularly true for texts that have been written for local readers. In turn, you’re going to dive into a lot of research. If you cannot translate something mot à mot into Turkish, then try and re-write in such a way that you preserve its meaning.
Interpreting for tourism
Interpreting for tourism is, by far, much more challenging than its written counterpart—largely because one lacks the time to sit down and do extensive research. The interpreter’s experience, in this case, plays much more of an important role. Those who work as part of tours need to rely on their accumulated wealth of background knowledge. For instance, if one is working at a certain historical landmark, their familiarity with that landmark will enable them to do a much better job of interpreting. Beyond that, interpreters who work for restaurants, hotels, and agencies (etc.) need to take the image of the brand that they are representing into consideration, and interpret according using an appropriate tone of voice.