An Analysis of Cultural Items and Translation Techniques in Visit Indonesia Website

Abstract

The translation of culture-specific items (CSIs) impacts the way the local culture will be perceived by international tourists, which makes it an essential aspect of tourism translation. In this study, CSIs from the Visit Indonesia website and their translation using Newmark’s (1988) methodology were investigated. The descriptive qualitative method with quantitative support was employed in the analysis of five tourism texts from the website. Documentation was utilized as the data collection method, while classification based on Newmark’s cultural categories and translation techniques was implemented for data analysis. The study yielded 57 culture-specific items, including Ecology (29.8%), Material Culture (24.6%), Organizations, Customs, Activities, Procedures, and Concepts (19.3%), Social Culture (15.8%), and Gestures and Habits (10.5%). Ten translation techniques were revealed, with Literal Translation (21.1%) and Couplet (19.3%) being the most frequent ones. From the findings, it is clear that the preservation strategy has been adopted with explanations of terms used, while some very localized terms, especially those involving food items and symbolism, have been excluded from the corpus. This study finds that Visit Indonesia is successful in creating a balance between cultural authenticity and accessibility. Future research should expand the dataset to strengthen these findings.