Metody zmniejszenia przepaści kulturowej w przekładzie tekstów turystycznych
Methods to reduce the cultural gap in the translation of tourism texts

Summary/Abstract: This paper is aimed to explore the conditions in which tourism texts are received by their users. We examine the market of tourist guides available in the Cracow area for Spanish speaking tourists, taking into account their expectations and cognitive structure. Based on a parallel corpus of translations into Spanish, we analyse the translation procedures employed by the translators. In a number of cases we observe elements of Polish culture which are certainly not known to translation readers but appear in the target texts without any explication. As a result, we conclude that the efficiency of a translation in terms of cultural mediation depends on several factors: translator’s cultural competence, publisher’s concern about the quality, as well as the year of publication. Despite general deficient quality, some improvement has been observed in newer guides, including guides revised for the second edition. Procedures required for an efficient adaptation of the target text to the user’s needs may, in some cases, exceed a traditional translation task. Therefore, translators need support and encouragement from publishers and clients to be able to apply their competence to complete the task satisfactorily.

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