The Challenge of Communicating in a Changing Tourism Market

In the tourism market today, growing numbers of tourists represent a range of cultural backgrounds, while new technologies such as the Internet have had a major impact on the way travellers from around the world obtain information on destinations and plan their trips. These and other changes imply that even if one or two "English speaking cultures" are considered prime targets of tourist brochures in English available at a destination, the readership of English texts may in fact consist of members of a range of cultures, especially when material is in two languages only, the local language and English, and tourists come from a range of countries. Since visitors do not share the same knowledge of local geography, culture, specialties and so on, communicating such local elements – in English – becomes especially challenging. This paper explores the notion of common ground, examining the presuppositions behind the use of specialized lexis in multilingual, bilingual and monolingual tourist brochures for Valtellina, a major alpine valley in Lombardy, Italy. The paper examines evaluation (Thompson and Hunston 2000) and discusses the linguistic choices that contribute to increasing shared knowledge about features and specialties of the area. It shows that in a number of cases, a single Italian term takes on a variety of forms in the texts in English and in other languages. The paper discusses the implications of these differences in terms of building a particular image for and awareness of the area and its specialties. It also discusses the issue of coordinating visitor materials, especially linguistic choices in non-Italian texts, when a number of organizations produce them. Finally, the paper considers the implications of the increasing use of the Internet to communicate aspects of the area to both visitors and local residents.