English for tourism

Du lịch là một ngành du lịch không khói mà trong đó du lịch Inbound đã và đang phát triển ngày càng mạnh tại Việt Nam. Lượng nhân lực du lịch không chỉ đòi hỏi cần có kiến thức về du lịch, kĩ năng mềm mà còn cần kĩ năng ngoại ngữ ổn. Trong số ngoại ngữ hiện đang được giao dịch trong ngành, tiếng Anh vẫn là ngôn ngữ chủ chốt. Tuy vậy, tiếng Anh trong du lịch có đặc thù riêng mà không ngành nào có, đòi hỏi nhân lực du lịch cần đầu tư công sức thời gian tìm hiểu. Trong tài liệu này, tác giả đề cập đến ngôn ngữ dựa trên 4 quan điểm: authenticity, strangerhood, play conflict mà người làm du lịch cần nắm để hiểu hơn về tâm lý và ngôn ngữ cần vận dụng với từng quan điểm (hay từng đối tượng khách chính)

CHAPTER TWO

TOURISM: BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE

1 Introduction

The Language of Tourism (LoT) has become pervasive and familiar in our society since it is part of

a promotional language used by the mass media and replicated in conversation Indeed, tourism uses language to manipulate reality and turning an anonymous place into a tourist destination

In this context, language becomes the most powerful driving force in tourism promotion, whose aim is “to persuade, lure, woo and seduce millions of human beings, and, in so doing, convert them from potential into actual clients” (Dann, 2003: 2)

In order to achieve persuasion, the LoT combines verbal descriptions (either oral or written) with glossy photographs and film footage, thus becoming a very important form of publicity since it constitutes an important part of a country‟s budgetary allocations

As said in the first chapter, the LoT shares come characteristics with specific languages

since:

 it is structured;

 it follows specific grammatical rules and has a specific lexis;

 it always conveys a message: it has a semantic content;

 it operates through a conventional system of symbols and codes

In addition, like other specific languages which have a direct contact with a wide public (e.g.: popularisation of specialised texts), it may contain elements from dialects and different registers (informal, colloquial, slang, etc.)

Because of tourism‟s financial and cultural importance around the world, writing effective promotional materials requires a high level of language competence and is vital to achieve success

in a field characterized by keen competition For this reason, those who create tourist text must be aware of the fact that tourist promotional texts use a lot more than a metaphoric or „iconic‟ language: through the use static and moving pictures, written text and audio-visual productions,

they seek to persuade perspective customers The LoT is grounded in discourse, as it uses

discourse as its main basis, because the LoT itself and its rhetoric are based PRIOR to any travel experience (logically and temporally)

The LoT addresses clients using their own culture and foreseeing their needs and motivations, trying to persuade future tourists to visit places which can meet the expectation of the clients themselves Indeed, it is said that tourism works via various pull factors or attractions of competing destinations However, one of the specific features of the LoT is that it is not a one-way language, indeed tourists can and they actually provide a feedback, for example when they report their experience to relatives and friends or when they write on travel blogs and/or specific websites, etc

In this way, tourists become promoters and have their share in shaping the LoT itself: they build their own personal images directly derived from those created by the tourism industry and other related sources (TV/readio commercials, ads, promotional material in general) The importance of

this kind of feedback is revealed by the increasing number of „give us a feedback‟ sections (both online and paper based) requested by tourist operators about destination, facilities and attractions Describing the nature of the LoT, Calvi (2005: 33) defines the language of tourism as “un linguaggio dalla fisionomia sfuggente”, meaning that it does not have a well-defined content and clear functional boundaries as it is influenced by a vast range of disciplines such as history, geography, the arts, and so forth, and includes different communicative functions (informative, persuasive, argumentative) To this respect, the LoT has also been defined as a “language of modernity, promotion and consumerism” (Thurot 1989: 12)

What is important to bear in mind is that the LoT is grounded on practice As a kind of discourse it is also value-committed (whereas general language is considered ideologically neutral) It is rhetoric as well, since it exercises a certain power over the addressees in order to

impress and persuade them Considering that it promotes destinations and attractions surrounded by

a socio-geographical background, the LoT is also narrative: it tells a story and relates an account to

an audience, for this reason it is often compared to storytelling, especially when tourist texts and guided tours provide an elaboration of narrative through anecdotes

2 Tourism (and its language) as a social phenomenon

The elements which generally constitute the LoT – and which are often present at the same time – are: word power, clichés, formulae, vocabularies, speech/talk/voices, idioms, semantics, grammar, text

Tourism itself is defined in many ways: communication, advertising, publicity, promotion, even propaganda) Each one of these ways influences the tourist discourse However, according to Dann (2006), four major theoretical approaches are generally used by scholars to understand the LoT and tourism itself as a social phenomenon:

• THE AUTHENTICITY PERSPECTIVE;

• THE STRANGERHOOD PERSPECTIVE;

• THE PLAY PERSPECTIVE;

• THE CONFLICT PERSPECTIVES

2.1 The AUTHENTICITY perspective

This approach emerged during the 1970s-1980s and derived from criticisms on the tourism industry, according to which tourism was based merely on an escapist fantasy

Another viewpoint argued that there is not just one type of tourism („conventional mass tourism‟) but an alternative to this which was called „alternative tourism‟ (other subsequent denominations included green tourism, ecotourism, soft tourism, responsible tourism) This kind of tourism had to be less environmentally disruptive, useful to host communities and it had to contribute to a greater understanding between visitors and local people

This approach believed that tourists looked for authentic experiences in other times and places, in a pseudo-search for the sacred) Thus, the tourist could be considered a pilgrim of the secular world interested to manifestations of the real lives of others His/her destinations became symbols of modernity and could range from nature to primitive customs, to work displays

Tourists who look for authenticity are either looking for a deeper involvement with society and culture (MacCannell 1977/1989) or trying to escape from the real, everyday world and use tourist attractions as distractions (Schudson 1979) However, nowadays we know that not all tourists are motivated by the search for authenticity and that the tourists‟ demands are composite and varied

The language used by this kind of tourism uses attractions as signs which represent something

to someone A sight is usually the first contact that the tourist has with the attraction To this

respect, the representation of the attraction can be on-sight (notices outside monuments) and off-sight (travel books, anecdotes and stories already read and heard by the tourist before travelling) Off-sight representations anticipate the real on-sight event and are related to the tourists‟

expectations about the attractions This kind of representation usually guides the tourist‟s choice when he/she goes to visit a particular destination This is also related to the „must see‟ features

present in text types related to tourism The features typical of a place become, then, symbolic markers, e.g cowboys for the USA

When an attraction is identified as a symbol, it is usually sacralised as well (such as in the case of tourists who buy souvenirs) and it works as a magnet for other tourists which are attracted to visit the site Thus, these new tourists work as testimonials/promoters for the tourism industry and,

in turn, add something new to the description of the place which becomes a marker

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Examples of symbolic markers

1 Cowboys, symbolic markers for the USA

2 The Union Jack used by Visit Britain (in this case, for example, the Union Jack as symbolic marker for the UK is accompanied by a sphere-like shape which serves either

to avoid a traditional squared flag or to represent a globe (maybe a hint to the past of Britain as Imperial power)

3 Symbolic markers connected to Italy However, the last picture comes out

as first option from a Google search for „Northern Italy‟ This gives only a partial view of this part of the country, testifying that symbolic markers do not represent the whole destination as only a partial representation.

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Usually off-sight representations are given by OUTSIDERS (i.e non-natives), indeed local perspectives rarely constitute a markers in present-day tourism industry To this respect Dann (2003: 10) affirms that “markers speak They convey messages to tourists, and the latter in turn relay messages to other tourists and potential tourists”

Every single marker (guidebooks with signalled attractions and facilities; maps with icons, etc.) forms a steady and essential part of the language of tourism because markers communicate through different media, verbal and non-verbal, we might say they work on a 3D dimension (verbal-iconic-imagination)

However, not everything they say is always or necessarily true The language of tourism is full of manifestations about the importance of the authenticity of the relationship between tourists and attractions, for example, typical instances of this are “this is a typical native house, this is the very place the leader fell, this is the original manuscript, this is a real piece of the true Crown of Thorns” (MacCannell 1989a: 14) This scholar believed that these expressions contain „truth markers‟ which elevate information to a privileged status In other words, when the tourism industry builds a

discourse about an attraction, it wants to give the impression of authenticity, but it knows very

well that there may be very little relationship between its words and the real attractions on display

As regards the notion of tourism seen as a sacred journey (Graburn 1995), travel is seen in terms of different perspectives such as ritual, ceremony, communion, pilgrimage, altered state of consciousness, moral state of belonging to a specific community Off-sight instruments for this kind

of tourism are: advertisements, brochures, TV, newspapers, magazines articles, and – in the last few decades – the web

The message conveyed by this kind of tourism passes through the visual dimension (written messages and iconic displays) and the aural dimension (appeal to the senses) This summarises the multichannel communication network of the language of tourism which shows exactly what the customer wants These devices emphasise the attractions of a place along with the items for which that place is famous, usually by means of ritual purification (thermal resorts), old-fashioned food (organic and traditional food in enogastronomic tourism), the countryside, nature and traditions All this is represented as an alternative of the past for over-crowded sophistications of the present

2.2 The STRANGERHOOD perspective

This perspective is generally applied to international tourism It originated from Erik Cohen (a sociologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) in the 1970s

According to this approach, novelty and strangeness are essential elements in the touristic experience (primary motives for tourism) As not all tourists can withstand the shock of a foreign culture and seek something familiar even abroad (see for example, Italians looking for Italian food and restaurants abroad), we can consider variation in the tourists‟ demands as along a continuum (graph below) ranging between familiarity and strangerhood In this model the Centre stands for the tourist everyday life, society, culture and network of relations The Other stands for what the tourist meets during the travel experience

At the extreme left of the continuum we have organised mass tourism: it provides a gaze out on strangeness from familiar surroundings, in the company of people from the same place of origin (staff of the hotel or travel agent or tourism company, or fellow tourists) This kind of tourism is exemplified by package tours

Then, we have the „individual mass tourism‟ It is not like a package tour but it has most of the arrangements organised before departure by a travel agent It shows greater independence which allows more occasions to meet the Other (that is, the local people and their culture) Both these

kinds of tourism are part of institutionalised tourism and they are under the control of the tourism

industry

Crossing the middle of the continuum and in the area of novelty and strangerhood, we meet

„the explorer‟, a traveller more than a tourist, a person who makes his/her own arrangements independently but who still seeks a minimum of comfort in accommodation and transportation (for example, by booking accommodation in international hotel chains)

At the extreme right of our continuum, we have „the drifter‟, a wanderer, someone who looks for total immersion in the host culture, an experience of total strangerhood These last two examples

are part of the non-institutionalised tourism They open up new areas of discovery and – in a

sense – they pave the way for institutionalised tourism, because if a destination becomes popular, then it attracts more tourists and local people organise the tourist offer in a traditional sense

Cohen demonstrated that not all tourists are pilgrims or entrapped in the mass tourism industry

He believed that there are five types of tourist holding different views of the world according to

their proximity or strangerhood to their own Centre (home society) or to the Other In this model, a

tourist is “a voluntary temporary traveller, travelling in the expectation of pleasure from the novelty and change experienced on a relatively long and non-recurrent round-trip” (Cohen 1974: 533) Novelty and change are, in particular, two central qualities to the purpose of the tourist trip Cohen‟s five types of tourist are:

– The RECREATIONAL;

– The DIVERSIONARY;

– The EXPERIENTIAL;

– The EXPERIMENTAL;

– The EXISTENTIAL

The recreational type corresponds to organised mass tourism The trip is seen as a relief provided

by the cinema, TV, theatre, a temporary and enjoyable moment away from our Centre

1 For example in this ad, the destination is Thailand but the tourist operator decided to promote a trip inspired by a famous film

The diversionary type corresponds to a demand for alienation and strangeness from the Centre:

tourism is an escape from the boredom and the routine of everyday life (for example, Disneyland below)

The experimental type is characteristic of people who are detached from the Centre of their own

society, but they seek different alternatives, experiment various lifestyles but they do not commit themselves to any (for example, in the slogans “be … for one day”, see picture below)

2 This picture represents the experimental kind of tourism It does not matter whether Dublinia is advertised as representing Dublin during the Viking invasion (700-800 AD) and the tourists pretend to be medieval characters What really matters is detachment from the Centre (both spatial and temporal

The existential type of tourist is the traveller who does not identify with his/her original Centre and

replaces it with an „elective Centre‟, making it the object of a sacred quest like a pilgrim This implies complete identification with the Other and total immersion in the „communities‟ of strangerhood

3 In this brochure, total immersion in the Other means concern about the Other‟s living conditions and cultural preservation

The model just illustrated evolved in the idea of the „paradise‟ theme in tourism, in which the Other

is seen as something unreachable but at the same time an ideal model if compared to the daily life

of the tourist

The dichotomy „familiarity/strangerhood‟ remains a competing approach with some linguistic implications: the language of tourism promotion is aware of the familiarity-strangerhood distinction The tourism industry uses this dichotomy to create a discourse coloured by the tourists‟ expectation prior to arrival at the destination, for example great hotel chains and their advertisements (pictures below)

Marriott Niagara Falls

Great hotel chains tend to present to their clients the same interiors and facilities, but they might be

located all around the world In the Marriott Niagara Falls‟ brochure, the local element

(strangeness) is displayed in the background, what prevails is the offer of comfortable bedrooms and bathrooms and the possibility of a pleasant dinner time (familiarity)

The tourism industry is aware that the visitors will feel isolated and that there will be a communicative gap between them and the „natives‟ and it attempts to fill this gap with a language shared with the tourist him/herself (establishing a discourse community) For this reason, a balance must be found between novelty and change and strangeness

To this respect, Cohen (1989) introduces the concept of keying as a form of „communicative

staging‟ used in tourism promotion to present a destination and its people as an alternative to routine mass tourism

In this context, the tourism industry usually combines a language which presents the Other in terms of escape from the Centre, but introducing it as another, different and alternative Centre This language is described as rhetoric because it seeks to portray touristic attractions as authentic (e.g jungle tours in which an „adventurous‟ trip is actually an experience well organised by the

operator) It shows the recurrence of terms such as: authentic, original, real, actual, primitive, simple, unsophisticated, natural, different, exotic, spectacular, remote, unspoilt, timeless, unchanging, traditional The experience thus becomes as an adventure and a discovery The

organised tourist is transformed into an explorer In actual fact, it looks like conventional mass tourism because everything, in the end, is pre-organised

2.3 The PLAY perspective

This approach is usually identified with Cohen‟s recreational tourist Its main feature is the search

for the out-of-ordinary and tourism itself is seen as a game

The perspective‟s promoter is John Urry, in the 1990s It is a post-modern perspective of the

tourism industry which can be understood only if we consider human modern condition Indeed,

according to Urry, modern society is characterised by a high degree of structural differentiation

Each cultural sphere (the family, science, morality) is rationally structured and organised according

to both a system of evaluation and convention and it is organised also in terms of stratified forms of culture from the lower to the higher (culture, life, art, pleasure and consumption)

As regards tourism, this viewpoint implies that this ordering of reality is evident in, for example, the growth of the British seaside resort: it was used by the working class to affirm its social solidarity and implied the organisation of proletarian mass leisure in holiday camps The

middle and upper classes were left to their usual form of tourism and leisure, that is to gaze romantically on nature as a bourgeois form of spiritual pleasure and upliftment

Continuing with Urry‟s perspective, the post-modern condition is emblematic of post-industrial, service-oriented, media-driven Western societies It is a process of cultural de-differentiation, pro-individualist, and anti-massification

In this context, pleasure is considered as a duty of self-actualization The LoT is represented

by the age of the image in which REPRESENTATION and HYPER-REALITY are more important than reality, or even superior to it Indeed, according to this perspective, tourism has always had a tendency to spectacularization (a combination of the visual, the aesthetic and the popular), whose accent is on anti-élite popular pleasures Then, culture is consumed not in a state of contemplation

but of distraction In this perspective, the actual location of an attraction becomes less and less

important Attractions compete on the basis of display because their visual characteristics have been produced on site and in the media to be endlessly reproduced through photography This kind of tourism increased with the rise of the service and new middle classes

In addition, physical boundaries evaporate and theme parks and artificial sites are created to provide limitless choices for consumption which are all the same Multiple attractions from around the world con be brought together in one area, limiting the necessity of travelling to separate destinations In this way, the attractions can be enjoyed via video and virtual reality displays directly at home

This concept led some scholars to think of this kind of tourism as the death of tourism itself However, the demand for different forms of travel for leisure is so varied that we can hardly think that such an event might occur in the near future

An example of how time and space can be eliminated is the following brochure taken from

the Samal Seaside Resort‟s website (Indonesia, http://www.samal-seasideresort.com/), whose main

slogan is “The place where time stops” This tendency is evident in the text of the brochure, in which attention is caught by reference to the fact that the tourist will be isolated, but he/she can keep the company of family and friends (as if he/she were at home) Attention is also put on the fact that the weather will be “warm tropical breeze all year round”, thus weather appears artificially controlled and the island, despite its „strangeness‟ and exoticism, is brought on a familiar dimension

In the kind of discourse exemplified by the above-presented website, space and time loose their boundaries: time is distorted with the nostalgic construction of heritage (for example, the museum becomes an emporium of objects rebuilt as consumable signs) and authenticity becomes an interpreted representation of reality

This means an evolution of travel and tourism from the individual travel by the rich to organised mass tourism to the possible end of tourism In this case, the end of tourism can be caused by consumption society in which there is a rejection of certain forms of mass tourism, increasing diversity of preferences, fewer repetitions of visits, a proliferation of alternative attractions and a multiplication of types of holidays and supporting information which are tailored

to meet the demand of the individual

This in turn leads to a de-differentiation of tourism from leisure, culture, retailing, education, sports and hobbies This tendency is also reflected in the promotion of everyday situations such as place where dining out, in which people can enjoy cosmopolitan and ethnic experiences without moving outside the limits of the city (put at the extreme, even the limits of one‟s home in the case

of takeaway services)

In this perspective, authenticity is crucial to all the perspectives seen above: it is essential to MacCannell‟s typology of tourist, important for Cohen‟s dichotomy of familiarity-strangerhood to the extent that travel is towards or away from reality; for Urry authenticity is not found in reality but

in an interpreted representation of reality

A representative example is provided again by Disneyland: it is out-of-time and out-of-place, deliberately artificial, overtly staged (represents the post-modern condition of playing with reality) However, it is functional to the kind of tourists it attracts as tourists do not care about the origins of the attraction as long as the visit is an enjoyable one Individual and authentic judgement about places is left to expert or socially accepted opinion The act and means of tourism become more important than the places visited (e.g Disneyland, again, is a series of thematic attractions of hyper-reality)

In this last two assertions from the PLAY perspective, we have different examples:

• visitors who check off starred attractions in their guidebooks without any other reference to

or concern about, for example, the lives of the inhabitants of a destination (e.g the Caribbean seen as a ludic place, or Jamaica, Polynesian isles, etc.;

• their inhabitants in turn start to share and desire the values demanded by the visitors);

• people who consider travel as a status symbol and bring back trophies of consumption;

• tourists who collect on film increasingly remote and exotic places

For this kinds of tourists nothing has relation, a history or a promise Everything stands by itself, coming and going like the scenes of a show at theatre, leaving the tourist/spectator where he/she was We have a language of recreation: the tourist gaze is anticipated and directed by film, TV and other media which reinforce the gaze itself

The gaze is shaped by professional opinion formers, e.g brochure writers, teachers, Tourist Boards‟ staff , who tell the people how, when and where to gaze Tourism transforms culture into consumption items which generate an artificial image of the Other; this kind of world is created by entrepreneurs, then packaged and marketed to the customers

However, this perspective is fundamentally based on the romantic and collective gaze of the

tourist For example, we can guide a tourist‟s gaze by using the verbs imagine, contemplate, you can view All aspects of social life are aestheticized with this kind of „visual consumption‟,

involving a variety of contexts and cultures, and making the travel itself to these places almost unnecessary