A Comparative Study of Translation and Tourism Discourse Between The Saudi and Moroccan Tourist Websites: The New Saudi Tourist Project and The Use Tourism Discourse.

Abstract

Abstract: To keep up with the latest developments, this study investigated the use of tourism discourse in the Saudi tourist website to examine the extent to which it could help or hinder the new Saudi tourist project, and how national identity is presented for the international tourists. This is a comparative study between two tourist websites: the Saudi tourist website and the Moroccan tourist website. This study used a mixed analytical approach which was conducted in two separate stages. The first stage analysed the semiotic contents of the websites using four phases of Pauwels’s multimodal framework (2012). The second stage consisted of a more in- depth textual analysis following Dann’s (1996) language of tourism techniques; however, only three techniques were highlighted in this study: comparison, key words and keying and languaging. The findings showed that both websites use similar techniques to exemplify strong sense of national identity. Therefore, the use of language and rhetoric was satisfactory in creating a favourable image of each destination for potential tourists in both writing and translation. However, the Moroccan website proved to be more strategic in using Arabic words in the translated texts, in order to persuade the reader to discover this unfamiliar destination. Finally, the results showed that the Saudi tourist website did a better job at inserting more human participants in the website images and communicating directly with website visitors, thus having a higher level of interactivity with them.