Negotiating cultural distance in the translation of Japanese tourism texts

Tourism is being heralded as a solution to the economic challenges generated by Japan's declining birth-rate and an aging population. The Japanese government is currently seeking to diversify the Asia-dominated inbound tourist market by targeting tourists from Western countries such as the U.S. and Australia. The diversity of cultures that characterise the Anglophone readership of texts promoting Japan as a tourist destination, as well as the non-homogenous linguacultural background of other potential visitors accessing tourism promotional texts in English, pose particular challenges for the translator when dealing with the cross-cultural transfer of culture-specific items (CSIs). This study aims to investigate the ways in which certain factors condition strategies for the translation of CSIs into English at the micro level, and the impact that these exert at the macro level on cultural representations of the Japanese source language community, drawing on Venuti's (1995/2008) conceptual framework of domestication and foreignisation. The study is a corpus-based investigation that incorporates both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. The corpus consists of 296 parallel texts totalling 83 478 Japanese source characters and 41 717 English target text words gathered from websites promoting tourism to regional destinations. Findings suggest that the sub-genre of tourism text and the native status of the translator are the primary factors that modulate micro-level choices of translation procedure, in turn shaping the representation of Japan as a tourist destination. The research extends existing literature on the translation of culture-specific lexis in tourism texts, in particular those promoting culturally remote source and target language communities -- abstract.