Brand Leadership at Stake
Selling France to British Tourists
CAROLYN SUMBERG
London Metropolitan University, UK
Abstract. For the first time in more than a decade, France has been overtaken by Spain as British touristsâ preferred holiday destination (Sunday Telegraph, 13/4/03). The tourist brochure plays an important role in the promotion of a country and as such has become a key factor in an economic activity that generates significant income. There has been a deliberate effort by the Spanish tourist board, well documented by translation scholars, to maximize Spainâs attraction for other nationalities, with careful consideration of the appeal of their tourism materials so far as design, production and translation are concerned. Through a study of a comparable corpus of tourist brochures, this paper considers how the approach to target text production could be said to enhance or detract from the effectiveness of tourist brochures translated from French into English and whether their promotional function is being achieved.
Terrorism, war and disease may have reduced the demand for tourism, yet the sector remains vitally important to the economy of many nations. Notwithstanding the rise of the internet, the tourist brochure still offers a key means for a country or city to attract visitors. According to Dann (1993: 893), the function of a tourist brochure is to woo, sell and seduce, and as such it represents the essence of tourism advertising. Yet its seductive powers could be jeopardized by an apparent lack of linguistic and textual competence, as revealed in many translated brochures.
In spite of the fact that advertising texts need to fulfil a precise function in the target culture, translators still seem to aim for linguistic equivalence rather than localizing or adapting to target language conventions. This paper seeks to clarify reasons for these problems and to suggest practical methods for resolving them.
I shall first consider questions raised by existing literature and then examine a small corpus of French brochures which have been translated into English. This paper brings together translation studies, advertising and the sociology of tourism and demonstrates that translation studies affect and are informed by a context which is wider than the discipline itself.
1. Selling France to the UK
January sees the annual pilgrimage of British francophiles to Londonâs Olympia. The Vive la France exhibition offers kepi-clad gendarmes, French food, clothes and books as well as visiting ambassadors and politicians. However, the real interest of the event is the plethora of stalls representing different French regions and cities, and the brochures which visitors take home are a key promotional tool of the French tourist industry. Just how successful are these brochures? Do they encourage readers to visit France? The corpus under consideration consists principally of French brochures, professionally translated into English, which were sourced at Vive la France in January 2003. While the brochures are as visually glossy as the exhibition, the majority make unconvincing reading. Though the tourism industry exists to encourage people to cross boundaries, it seems, paradoxically, that written tourist materials often fail to achieve their communicative purpose across cultural borders. This not only has a negative effect on the national tourist industry, creating inadequate promotional documents, but also on the way in which people perceive the wider translation profession. For the English-speaking market, holiday brochures are one of the main occasions on which the general public comes face to face with translated material.
Dann (1993:893) believes that brochures are âwidespread and effectiveâ because they âattempt to woo, seduce, inform, project and sell in one operationâ and that they âundoubtedly represent tourism advertising par excellenceâ. For the translator, brochures might seem innocuous documents lacking the intellectual weight of political, legal, scientific or medical texts. Yet they present significant challenges to the translator, making it likely that political, legal, scientific and medical texts, for all the associated demands relating to terminology and text type conventions, will be translated with greater effectiveness than the apparently unchallenging brochure. The small volume of existing research in this area already indicates that many translated brochures fail to achieve their persuasive function. By examining French brochures which have been translated into English, this paper aims to highlight a selection of key problem areas, suggesting how they might have arisen and offering some practical methods for their future resolution. The emphasis of the paper is pragmatic; research and theory-based principles, established by applied translation studies, are used to suggest possible solutions for a commercial problem within a particular market sector.
1.1 Tourism background
Although France remains the worldâs most popular tourist destination overall, earning ÂŁ24 billion in 2002 from its 1.7 million visitors, the number of English-speaking visitors is declining, according to The Daily Telegraph (13 April 2003). The country has suffered as a result of a political and economic situation outside the control of the tourist business itself. The American market has declined due to the weakness of the dollar against the euro, perceived anti-American feeling in France and the threat of terrorism. As far as the British market is concerned, anti-French political attitudes have been expressed in certain sections of the tabloid press as a result of the French stance on the war in Iraq. Furthermore, throughout 2003, France attracted negative consumer publicity in broadsheet newspapers read by its target market, The Daily Telegraph and Times. The Daily Telegraph (13 April 2003) also announced that France had been overtaken by Spain as the most popular holiday destination for British tourists. Four months later (1 August 2003), it described how
millions of foreign tourists are shunning France this summer, costing the country billions of pounds and threatening its position as the worldâs favourite destination. Bookings are down by 50% on last year from the States and British visitors have fallen by 10%.
Further negative publicity appeared in The Daily Telegraph (11 October 2003) when it described how France failed to feature in the ten most preferred countries of British tourists and was in fact ranked by its readers as the sixth least favourite.
Declining tourist figures have many causes and a downward trend will not be reversed by poor quality tourist literature; the vast French tourism infrastructure needs, therefore, to find ways of addressing this problem. It may be that the source texts are also poorly written, or simply that the style and associated values of the source text do not conform to the expectations of the addressee in the target culture (see de Mooij, this volume). And it may further be possible that Franceâs previous success has caused it to become complacent. As a brand, tourism to France is experiencing disaffection and declining brand loyalty amongst the British. A fresh look at the overall promotional strategy is perhaps required.
2. The literature
Although âthe translation of advertisements provides us with a microcosm of almost all the prosodic, pragmatic, syntactic, semiotic and even ludic difficulties to be encountered in translationâ (Smith and Klein-Braley 1995: 173), at the time of writing only a small amount of research focuses on translation studies and advertising. Smith and Klein-Braley (ibid.:174) confirm that little work has been undertaken in this area and that only scant attention is paid to training translators in this field. There is even less literature directly linking translation studies, advertising and tourism materials. In view of space constraints, I have chosen to focus primarily on publications on advertising and tourism since these have a direct bearing on my research.
A tourism text cannot be approached without an understanding of cultural differences and the difficulties these can create. The concept of sociocultural background and the mismatch between lexicons and cultures are discussed in classic texts by Vinay and Darbelnet (1977), Newmark (1988a, 1988b), Nida (1993), Snell-Hornby (1995), Larson (1984/1998) and Bassnett (1980/2002). Their work shows the interdependence of culture and text, the âindissoluble connection between language and way of lifeâ (Bassnett ibid.: 2). The text is not merely discourse to be transcoded, but is embedded within a sociocultural background. Brochures are an integral part of the target culture and dependent on its expectations and norms; for Snell-Hornby (1999:95) they are important texts which âeven in an age of increasing globalisation ⌠are culture bound; their impact varies with the reader and his or her background, origin and mentalityâ. Adab (2000a:197) endorses this view, calling for a greater awareness of target reader needs, expectations and values; she also argues that intercultural advertising would be better served in many cases by adapting rather than translating the source text.
Translators of tourism materials therefore need to be familiar with a range of strategies to deal with these texts. Adab (2000b:227) points out that âuntrained âtranslatorsââ take a linguistic approach without considering the socio-cultural context, whilst the importance of considering target language âreader profile and needsâ is also stressed in the functionalist approach outlined by Schäffner and Kelly-Holmes (1994), Nord (1997) and House (2002). SĂŠguinot (1994:56) and Snell-Hornby (1999) also apply this approach to tourism materials: the tourist brochure is an âoperativeâ text, one whose extralinguistic effect is designed to take precedence over its content and form. The brochureâs âdominant function is to present material in such a way that it attracts attention and invites patronageâ (Snell-Hornby 1999:96). Such texts need to fulfil the conventions of their text type and âtheir function as instruments of persuasionâ (ibid.:95). With this in mind Snell-Hornby (ibid.) concludes that the âbungledâ translation, âthe ultimate confortâ, should not be corrected to âthe ultimate comfortâ but if it is to become âan instrument of persuasionâ should be rendered as âthe last word in luxuryâ (ibid.:103). For Guidère too (2000:280), the only criterion of a successful translation is wh...
