Mass Tourism and the Environment : A Translation Study of Terminology, Metaphors and Hyphenated Premodifiers in Two Articles

Abstract: The following essay is an analysis of a translation from English into Swedish of two articles concerning tourism, travelling and the environment. The language of the articles is expressive and rich in metaphors, which evokes images in the mind of the reader. The translation was performed with the aim to transfer this effect into the translated texts and the aspects to be examined in the analysis were chosen with this in mind.One of the three aspects to be examined is the use of metaphors and how they are translated into Swedish. Many of the metaphors bear reference to travelling and the environment which gives them a function of enforcing the message and engaging the reader in the text. In order to obtain the same effect in the Swedish translations several translation strategies had to be used.The second aspect to be examined is the terminology used within tourism and the environment.  The environmental concern is a growing trend which inevitably influences the language and requires a new set of useful and understandable terms. This becomes clear when reading and translating the articles at hand. The environmental terms are fairly new and sometimes hard to distinguish. In this study focus is set on the translation strategies and the procedures used in order to find the Swedish equivalents of the terms in this context.The third aspect is the translation of hyphenated pre-modifiers. This aspect is particularly interesting, since the phenomenon is more or less unknown in Swedish. Of the fifteen hyphenated pre-modifiers in the source texts none were translated into hyphenated pre-modifiers in Swedish although five of them were translated into regular pre-modifiers. The analysis is based on the translation strategies applied and the comparison of syntactic structures of the expressions in English and Swedish.