La calidad en el proceso de traducción ES>FRestudio traductológico de la información web institucional sobre fiestas de Semana Santa de interés turístico internacional

Abstract

Festivities, mass events and celebrations are inherent to Spanish culture and are a reflection of its customs. This fact, among others, has caused that many of these celebrations have crossed our borders and have obtained the declaration of Festivity of International Tourist Interest. The present research is focused on the information translated into French about the Holy Week that the web pages of the tourist offices offer in those cities where this festivity has been declared of International Tourist Interest. The purpose this study has been conceived for is summarized in one main objective and three secondary objectives. The main objective is to find out if the information on Easter Week shown on the web page of the tourist offices in cities where the festivities of Easter Week have been declared of International Tourist Interest is translated into French, as well as to analyse the quality of these translations into that language. Three secondary objectives that are related to this main objective can be derived from this primary one. The first secondary objective consists of finding out which are the key techniques used in the translations into French of the culturemes relative to the Holy Week that appear in the mentioned web pages. The second secondary objective is to find out who is responsible for the translations, i.e., whether it is a professional translator, an employee of the tourist office, a native speaker, a trustworthy person with knowledge of languages or an automatic translator. The third secondary objective is based on knowing the sources of information consulted by French tourists (being those the target of our study) before embarking on their trip to Spain and during their stay in the place, as well as the degree of satisfaction with the information received from the tourist offices. In addition, we will get to know how many of the respondents have visited Spain during the Easter period. This questionnaire will only focus on French tourists who have already visited Spain, as it is one of the first three countries of origin for the tourists who visit Spain the most. As for the methodology used to achieve the objectives, it is based on a mixed model; namely, it is represented by both a quantitative design and a qualitative design. The research instruments chosen to carry out our study are the academic literature corpus, the report and the questionnaire. In the light of the obtained results, we found that most of the websites of the tourist offices under study have a French translation. As far as the quality of these translations is concerned, it can generally be considered as average, i.e., the information in French is comprehensible as a whole, but the reading is not entirely fluent and some mistakes can be found, as well as inadequacies in the treatment of a cultural reference. With regard to translation techniques, the most commonly used in the translation of religious culturemes are the equivalent, followed by the loanword. On the other hand, we note that tourist offices mainly use the services of professional translators. Concerning the French tourists, we found that they made more use of tourist offices in person than online. Likewise, most of them were satisfied with the information they received from the tourist offices, in terms of quality and quantity, and few are those who visit Spain during Holy Week, due to the fact that they do not have enough days during that period and do not have a religious motivation, but instead a cultural and sun and beach tourism one.