últimas corrientes teóricas en los estudios de traducción - Gredos ...

J. IGOR PRIETO ARRANZ: (MIS)INFORMING THE READER: TOURIST TEXT TRANSLATION
gradually lessened the further apart both languages (and cultures) stand (Newmark 1986:
94; Sumner-Paulin 1995: 549).
However, translation exists, and the translator is there to bridge the (linguistic and
cultural) gap existing between the author and the TL reading public (Tricàs 1982: 39), an
impossible task for him/her to achieve unless s/he is in possession of a truly effective
cultural competence that helps him/her supply all the information that STs always imply
and that target readers may not know (Tricàs 1982: 39; 40-45; Alcaraz 1990: 132-133;
Gouadec 1991: 552-555; Álvarez 1994: 216; Marrocco-Maffei 1994: 315; Valero 1996: 14).
Thus, it could be said that, in an ideal world, this translator should not only be bilingual but
also bicultural (Valero 1995: 562). It is only with this knowledge that s/he will be able to
successfully get meaning across apparently insurmountable cultural barriers so that the
target reader may at least get a taste of that ST which is in principle beyond his/her reach. I
am therefore defending a concept of translation very much in keeping with Kuhiwczak’s
notion of “cultural trade” (1995).
The translator, therefore, must always have the target audience in his/her mind,
which makes Toury believe it unthinkable “that a translation may hover in between
cultures” for, after all, “[t]ranslations are facts of target cultures […]” (1995: 28-29). That is
why Gémar states that translating a text is adapting it to the cultural, social and ethnic
reality of the reading public it addresses (1996: 500) and why the TT will always differ from
the ST in some degree (Barbe 1996: 330).
When discussing the intercultural dimension of translation it is usually literary
translation that scholars have in mind. However, my aim today is to show how it also
applies to other kinds of texts. In this regard, it is worth mentioning that, whether we like it
or not, translators do not live only on the translation of literary works. Thus, many other
genres or text types exist which are also subject to translation and to which the term
“cultural transfer” also applies.
Consequently, I mean to concentrate on one of such sub-genres, namely the tourist
leaflet and tourist text in general and show how the different cultural backgrounds of both
reader and translator may constitute one of the greatest problems the latter has to
overcome in order to achieve an acceptable translation.
I shall of course be drawing data from a real text, namely from a free 60-page
publication entitled Asturias: Pueblos y Concejos. Guía Turística and its English version
(Asturias: Villages and Districts. Tourist Guide), both to be found at any tourist information
office throughout Asturias and arguably at any Spanish Tourist Authority office worldwide
(see appendix).
When talking about the tremendous importance of tourism in Spain, always one of
the three most visited countries in the world, and arguably the favourite overseas
destination for British tourists (Garín-Muñoz & Pérez 2000; Haiyan, Romilly & Liu 2000:
614), we must bear in mind that this trade is still unequally distributed throughout our
geography, being successfully exploited in some regions and only very recently discovered
in others. Asturias indeed is a good example of the latter, and the main point of this paper
is to show translation as an exceptionally powerful tool to either attract or (unconsciously)
repel the tourist, either result depending on the quality of the translation. And it is precisely
because of the importance of the aim of the text or, to use more precise terms, its function,
that I shall resort to Functionalism (especially as put forward by Nord [1990, 1991, 1996 &
1997]) and use it as my underlying theoretical framework.
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