Pragmatics of Translating Tourism Texts: A Case of Spiritual Tourism in India

Abstract

English texts are often deliberately enveloped with mysticism to arouse curiosity of the foreign tourists, whereas the Hindi texts remind the readers about the religious and cultural heritage. The culture-specific terms related to these places have not been translated successfully in the English texts, which provide the readers a half-baked spiritual and cultural view of the places. This paper analyzes and compares the English and Hindi texts describing and promoting two significant religious and spiritual tourist places of Uttar Pradesh, India, viz., Mathura-Vrindavan and Varanasi, by taking data from the website of UP tourism department. I compare the speech act strategies and presuppositions of the texts, and find a significant difference in the strategy taken for persuading the tourists in these two languages as well as in the pragmatic presuppositions associated with the texts. © The GLOCAL All rights reserved.