“ A Pretty Village is a Welcome Sight ” : A Contrastive Study of the Promotion of Physical Space in Official Tourism Websites

This paper analyses adjectival descriptions used to frame and promote physical space in tourism texts in English and in Greek, and how any differences are negotiated in translation. A comparison is drawn across three categories of space (human-made, natural, and abstract) to investigate how each locality affects and is affected by linguistic choices. Methodologically, a corpus triangulation approach is employed, combining corpora created from three types of tourism websites: original or non-translated Greek websites; their translations into English; and non-translated websites in English. Results reveal that, while important differences are observed between English and Greek non-translated texts, translations tend to stay very close to their source texts, with small differences observed across the three categories of space. This study contributes to both tourism and translation studies by offering insight into how space is framed across languages, which can inform, and ultimately, transform, translation practice.