BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA TOURISM ONLINE: (IN)ACCESSIBILITY OF LOCAL COLOR RELATING TO ARCHITECTURE TERMS

Abstract

Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), a country rich in history and culture, has for centuries been at the crossroads between the West and the East, which has resulted in quite a mixture of cross-cultural elements that pose many obstacles for translators. As the issues of tourism-language translation have been relatively underexplored in BiH, this article attempts to investigate the extent to which the translators of tourism-related content available online succeeded in making the local color of architecture-related terms accessible to foreign visitors. The article also examines whether the issue of accessibility of local color was addressed adequately by local translators. Many formal and informal online sources were used for the selection of prominent cultural terms and their English translations, which were analyzed in terms of lexis and semantics. We identified many examples where the cultural content was made accessible to the target audience, as well as examples where the transfer of the cultural content was done less successfully. In cases where translators experienced difficulty while transferring cultural terms, we attempted to draw prospective translators’ attention to potential pitfalls in the process of cultural mediation in translation from BiH’s official languages into English. Keywords: Bosnia and Herzegovina, tourism online, mediation, (in)accessibility, local color, translation, architecture