This thesis argues that website translations can be taken as a form of social control striving to achieve certain political or economic ends by the website owners from a self-representation perspective. Studying the Chinese-to-English translations of the destination sections in four tourism websites, this study aims to derive interpretations as to how the act of translating formulates multiple self-representations, which may be seen as ideological attempts to influence the perceptions of target-text audiences. This thesis has two main parts. The first, Chapters 1 and 2, outlines the research objectives, background information and the conceptualisation of the four cases, and a two-stage comparative method working within an integrated theoretical framework. The second part, Chapters 3 to 5, comprises the empirical findings, discussing how features of discourses hypothetically prominent in a particular dimension of the website context may come to manifest different identities of the website owners. The translation strategies for these features are examined to identify the aspects of these identities changed in the self-representation contexts. Chapter 3 hypothesizes that the common context of the websites is dominated by tourism discourse and other associated discourses. The translation strategies for discourse features expressing a set of shared identities of the website owners suggest that the concepts of consumerism and commodity advertising are re-formulated in the translations. Chapters 4 and 5 discuss further identities of the owners manifested in the diverging sub-contexts of the websites, and underline aspects of these identities foregrounded in the translations. Chapter 4 highlights the diverging organisational identities of the official and corporate websites. The translation strategies for certain organisational features show that different organisational stances, different beneficiaries and different business rivals of the two categories of websites are emphasised in the translations. Studying the identity of being ‘Chinese people’ formulated by certain re-presented features of local discourse, Chapter 5 points to the differences between the national images re-presented by the China websites and the regional images foregrounded by the HK websites in their translations. Finally, the conclusions summarize various notions relating to the multiple identities re-formulated in the self-representation context, as well as their economic and political implications.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T15:51:29Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 AndreaNBC_DISSERT.pdf: 2088227 bytes, checksum: 75d8e2dd231d4a79cb9b2b2b9f4557b5 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-08-19 / Coordena??o de Aperfei?oamento de Pessoal de N?vel Superior / This study aims to analyze tourist information provided by the official websites of the 2014 FIFA World Cup host cities. The framework developed by D?az (2005) was applied to analyze different aspects, such as: local tourist information, tourist services distribution, communication and interaction between website and users, and website foreign language versions. This dissertation describes how society and tourism are related by analyzing the consequences of technological evolution in the travel and tourism sector, showing the importance of the use of information and communication technology to provide accurate, upto- date and low-cost information to tourist destinations. Because of the nature of the study, the research subjects are the 12 Brazilian host cities represented by their respective official webpages (cities, states and convention bureaus), and also Brazil s official website, totalizing 36 elements to be analyzed. The methodology has been characterized as descriptive and exploratory with quantitative analysis, and also using desk research and survey literature review. In order to analyze the data collected, parametric and nonparametric statistics tests were used, such as: variance analysis (ANOVA and KRUSKAL-WALLIS) to measure means variance between groups combined with multiple comparison tests (Tukey and Games Howell); nonparametric correlations tests (Kendall s Tau b); and cluster analyses. Finally, Microsoft Excel was used to collect data and SPSS for managing data through quantitative analyses tests. Overall, the websites of the south region showed better results than the other Brazilian regions. Despite this result, the data analysis demonstrated that the available tourist information are incomplete as it was verified that tourist host cities websites are unable to provide all the information needed for the web visitors to organize and plan their journey. This means that visitors have to look for more information in other sources / Trata da avalia??o das informa??es disponibilizadas em websites tur?sticos oficiais dos estados e das cidades-sede brasileiras da Copa do Mundo de 2014, seguindo o modelo e os crit?rios de avalia??o estabelecidos na metodologia desenvolvida por D?az (2005). Descreve a rela??o entre turismo e sociedade da informa??o, enfatizando a import?ncia do uso das Tecnologias da Informa??o e Comunica??o em disponibilizar informa??es confi?veis, atualizadas e de baixo custo acerca dos destinos em quest?o. Dentre os principais aspectos a serem analisados, tem-se: informa??o sobre o destino e servi?os locais disponibilizados nos websites tur?sticos; capacidade de comercializa??o e distribui??o dos servi?os tur?sticos; capacidade de comunica??o e intera??o dos sites com seus usu?rios; exist?ncia de vers?es dos websites em outros idiomas. Por se tratar de pesquisa em ambiente virtual, os sujeitos da pesquisa foram representados pelas 12 cidades-sedes da Copa e seus respectivos websites oficiais de turismo (municipais, estaduais e convention bureau), mais o portal brasileiro de turismo, totalizando assim um n?mero de 36 p?ginas webs a serem analisadas. A metodologia caracterizou-se como explorat?rio-descritiva, quantitativa, bibliogr?fica e documental. Aplica t?cnicas estat?sticas param?tricas e n?o param?tricas, tais como: an?lise de vari?ncia (ANOVA e KRUSKAL-WALLIS) para medir a varia??o entre as m?dias dos grupos em combina??o com testes de compara??es m?ltiplas de Tukey e Games Howell; teste de correla??o n?o param?trico Tau de Kendall; e an?lise de cluster. Para a coleta de dados, utiliza os softwares Microsoft Excel, e o SPSS para a tabula??o, tratamento e an?lise dos dados, atrav?s da aplica??o de t?cnicas quantitativas. Dentre os principais resultados encontrados ficou evidente que os websites da regi?o sul e os pertencentes a categoria municipal apresentaram resultados mais positivos dentre os ?ndices avaliados. Conclui que as informa??es disponibilizadas nos websites est?o, em sua maioria, incompletas, pois de acordo com os dados obtidos, verificou-se que os mesmos n?o s?o capazes, por si s?, de fornecer aos usu?rios/turistas todos os dados necess?rios para se planejar uma viagem