Translating Culture-specific Items on the Jordan Tourism Board Website: Implications for Tourism Promotion and Cultural Representation

Abstract

This study examines the translation of culture-specific items (CSIs) on the Jordan Tourism Board (JTB) website, focusing on whether translations tend toward domestication or foreignization and how Jordanian culture is represented for international audiences. A mixed-methods approach was employed, with the JTB website serving as the case study. A total of 1,178 CSIs were extracted, categorized according to Newmark’s (1988) taxonomy, and analyzed in terms of his translation procedures. These procedures were then grouped within Venuti’s domestication–foreignization framework to determine their overall cultural orientation. The CSIs were concentrated in material culture and institutional or conceptual domains, reflecting the website’s emphasis on Jordanian heritage and cultural assets. The most frequent procedures were couplets, recognized translation, literal translation, transference, and through translation. Venuti’s framework showed a predominance of intermediate procedures (54.3%), followed by foreignization-oriented procedures (29.0%) and domestication-oriented procedures (16.8%). This pattern suggests a translation strategy that balances accessibility with cultural visibility, conceptualized here as the “Accessible Other” strategy, while favoring cultural preservation when moving beyond the intermediate position. The study contributes to Arabic–English tourism translation research and highlights the potential role of translation in promoting culturally distinctive representations of Jordan to international audiences.