Hotel websites: pragmatic adaptation in translation from English into Russian and from Russian into English

The article focuses on pragmatic adaptation in translation of hotel internet websites from English into Russian and from Russian into English. Tourist content translation itself including hotels web sites translation is not a simple mechanical decoding of information from one language into another but its adequate pragmatic adaptation to linguistic and cultural peculiarities of the target audience. The study material comprises such hotel websites as Radisson Hotels, Corinthia London, Holiday Inn and the others. The comparative text analysis of the hotel websites shows that the target text should be completely or partially adapted in order to create effective content and preserve attractiveness. In the process of adaptation, such translation transformations as descriptive translation, meaning extension, addition and omission of information, paraphrasing, etc., are used. Transformations are shown to be carried out on the basis of tourist website content assessment regarding cross-cultural peculiarities, including type of cultures, and concepts relevant to culture. In the process of translation, the linguistic means explicating the concept of “privacy”, which is significant to British culture, are rendered using such techniques as paraphrasing and explication followed by syntactic deployment of the structure in the secondary text. This study may present interest for tourist discourse experts, creators of multilingual versions of hotels websites, as well as market experts who assess the attractiveness of tourist products.