Translating Australian Urban Gastronomic Experiences for Malay Tourists

Whether to satisfy one’s hunger or just to indulge, gastronomy has always been a crucial part of the tourist experience. Given the importance of food in tourism, tourism promotional materials often promote destinations by highlighting appealing gastronomic experiences. Nevertheless, differences in terms of gastronomic preferences from one culture to another could possibly pose a challenge in cross-cultural tourism promotion and advertising, particularly in the case of translation. Bearing in mind that translated tourism promotional materials have at times been the subject of criticism among translation researchers, this paper attempts to investigate a multilingual Australian tourism website to explore the challenges involved in translating gastronomic experiences from English into Malay. Using the functional approach to translation, the paper analyses the English version of the website (source text) to see how gastronomy is used as a tool of persuasion to persuade Anglo readers and how it is translated into Malay. The Malay translation of the website (target text) is analysed to see whether it is coherent and consistent with the cultural situation in which it functions and whether it is suitable to perform its intended function of persuasion. The analyses revealed that the Malay translation, in general, did not take into consideration the fact that most of the themes and elements used to promote Australian cities gastronomically to the Anglo audience are not appealing to the Malay audience. This has resulted in the Malay translation being functionally inadequate. Based on the findings derived from the source text and target text analyses, potential strategies for the production of functionally adequate translations are proposed