Cultural localisation as a strategy to preserve the persuasive function in the translation of tourism websites from French into English

Tourist promotional texts function like advertising texts in that they aim to “persuade, lure, woo, and seduce” (Dann 1996Dann, Graham. 1996. The Language of Tourism: A Sociolinguistic Perspective. Wallingford: CAB International.). In the context of global marketing, tourists can be considered consumers who seek to escape from ordinary life carrying their culturally embedded mindsets with them. Although cultural differences have been widely discussed in the literature on tourism translation, few studies have focused on the deeper level ‘out-of-awareness’ culture through which tourists travelling abroad interpret what they see. This paper investigates cultural localisation as a strategy to adapt the source text of a French wine tourism website to the hidden cultural values of British tourists in order to preserve the persuasive function of the target text. Using Hall’s anthropological iceberg model and Hofstede’s cultural dimensions as the framework, a small sample of French source texts and their English translations are compared to demonstrate the link between the stylistic features of tourism language and the psychological motivations of tourists, highlighting the interplay between all levels of the cultural iceberg. The findings suggest that culturally localised tourism websites are more likely to succeed as instruments of persuasion, with ego-targeting discussed as an effective strategy when adapting the text to appeal to the British market.