The Role of Transcreation in Tourism: A Spanish-English Corpus-Based Study of Online Travel Magazines

Abstract

Transcreation has been shown to be a common strategy in persuasive texts such as those found in advertising, marketing or tourism. The present chapter aims to explore the role of transcreation in travel magazines and to categorise transcreations according to the type of changes being made. To this end, a corpus of travel article titles was collected from the Spanish magazine Ronda, a bilingual Spanish-English publication of the airline Iberia. A comparative analysis was conducted to identify the strategy followed in the transfer of titles from Spanish to English. Three main patterns were detected: fully transcreated titles, titles with partial transcreation and titles translated literally. As this chapter is particularly concerned with transcreation, we have selected and analysed representative examples that can be used to illustrate the different cases of transcreation. Transcreations appear here to be an essential linguistic strategy for the internationalisation of a destination, rendering the message more appealing to a different readership and a different market.