Cultural Linguistic Encoding in the Translation of Tourist Brochures in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Tourism is a key driver of expansion and a contributor to national income in Saudi Arabia's rapidly diversifying economy in the years to come. Tourist numbers in 2023 are estimated to exceed one hundred million, with tourism revenue for the year exceeding SAR 135 billion, according to conservative estimates. Language is an integral part of this pattern of development – international tourists linguistic access to Saudi culture and attractions – and is clearly defined as a key enabler in Saudi Arabia's economic diversification strategy, as enshrined in Saudi Vision 2030. In this manuscript, a cultural-linguistic approach is used to examine the process of translation as it occurs in tourist brochures translated into and from English as a second language into Arabic, with a focus on the core values in Saudi Arabia – hospitality, religious identity, and tradition – and how these are linguistically gauged across languages. Based on Skopos theory and the domestication-foreignization approach, the study integrates theory, a four-category coding system, and current empirical research on the Arabic-English tourism-translation domain, using this integration to develop a repeatable methodology for analyzing Saudi promotional texts. The five conceptual models, namely the continuum model according to Venuti, the model of equivalence by Nida, the procedures by Vinay and Darbelnet, the Skopos process model, and Sulaiman and Wilson's cultural-conceptual translation model, are introduced as complementary lenses for analysis, and the empirical results of prior work are synthesized across the four coding categories. The synthesis shows that translators of tourism texts from Saudi Arabia tend toward domestication for pragmatic Saudi expressions of hospitality and toward foreignization, gloss, and transliteration for cultural-religious and heritage lexis. The study highlighted implications for a national tourism policy, promotional effectiveness, and the curriculum of translator training programs that consider Saudi Vision 2030, as well as the opportunities for the primary coding of the corpus that would empirically test the framework propounded in this study.