Narrating/translating online plantation tourism

Abstract

The purpose of the essay is to conduct an analysis of plantation tourism websites in the USA South, measuring the degree to which the history of slavery remains (in)visible or is explained within online promotional texts like websites, and to outline if today the digital space can become a space for inclusivity and equality. The essay will be divided in two parts: the analysis of a corpus of 10 major Historical Plantations websites in order to outline the principal verbal and visual strategies used to portray the history of slavery in the American South, and a comparison of 3 websites which offer translations in Italian and/or French in order to outline differences, adaptations, omissions, changes in the target texts. The methodology used will refer to CDA, Social Semiotics and Tourism Translation with the primary aim of outlining all the aspects of a website as a multimodal text. The essay will offer the results of both a quantitative and qualitative analysis trying to show how plantations as tourist attractions are represented through linguistic, cultural, and visual choices that represent the tourist experience in a highly codified way, and to demonstrate how this representation is adapted into different languages/cultural contexts, often reducing information and useful data to attract international tourists, and simplifying the message.