On Localization Of Tourism Websites From The Perspective Of Multimodal Analysis

Due to the globalization of tourism industry,the development of tourism websites in more than one language has been growing steadily and has become a principal strategy for promoting tourism industry.As the number of outbound Chinese tourists has soared and surged over the past decade,China is now considered as one of the main tourism target markets by many countries,consequently leading to the growing demand for web localization for Chinese market and web translation into Chinese.Building up well-constructed Chinese websites for English tourism organizations goes far beyond mere translation.As a matter of fact,websites contain many aspects of content that need to be dealt with during localization: common content such as texts,images and links;transactional assets such as payment methods;community assets which refer to social networks such as Facebook in the west and Wechat in China.In this light,the present study employs a multimodal approach in the analysis of website localization.The localization of British national tourism website into Chinese market is selected as the object of study.The homepages of both English and Chinese versions of the website,along with all the subpages accessible within one click from the homepage are employed to build the corpus.All the texts and images on the two sites constitute four sub-corpora,which are analysed at the lexical,stylistic and visual levels.Both quantitative and qualitative methods are applied,with the adoption of corpus analysis tools,the illustration of textual and visual modes and the employment of Kress and Leeuwen's image analysis model.It is found that both the verbal and nonverbal content have been customized for Chinese customers in the localization process.Thus,the study proposes that the shift from mere translation to trans-creation is needed in localization process and that translators should take into consideration of the verbal texts which are focused in traditional translation process and non-verbal elements which are important in the current localization industry.