Towards creating a multilingual dictionary of tourist terms

The development of international tourism gives rise to a number of new concepts and special terminology which forms the basis for dictionaries of tourism terms. However, most of them are mono- and bilingual, while multilingual dictionaries would be especially useful for future employees of the tourism industry and international visitors. This article contains a description of main characteristic features of tourism terminology and a brief review of three dictionaries of tourism terms - “The Great Glossary of Terms for International Tourism”, “The Multilingual Dictionary of Tourism (Nature - Culture - Travel)” and “Russian Encyclopedic Dictionary. Tourism”. The research aims to present possible structure of a new multilingual dictionary based on the advantages of published dictionaries under analysis. It is suggested to compile an electronic dictionary including terms and their definitions in six languages: English, Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, Russian and French. The choice of languages is explained by their popularity around the world. Furthermore, four of them are official languages of UNWTO and all of them are official languages of UNESCO. Such dictionary will help to avoid ambiguous interpretation of key concepts in the tourism industry in six languages most spoken around the world. The research methodology includes a content analysis of tourism dictionaries and an in-depth theoretical review.