Linguistic And Cultural Features Of Tourism Terminology: An Analysis In A Cross-Cultural Context

Abstract

Tourism has evolved into a global, multimodal communication ecosystem in which specialized terminology indexes experiences, spaces, and identities while mediating encounters among cultures. This article examines the linguistic and cultural features of tourism terminology through a cross-cultural lens. Drawing on discourse and translation studies, intercultural pragmatics, and cognitive linguistics, the study analyzes a 1.2-million-word multilingual corpus of tourism texts (destination marketing materials, museum and tour scripts, guidebooks, and travel advisories) in English, Russian, and Uzbek compiled from 2015–2024. The research explores how culture-bound concepts, metaphors, evaluative lexis, and genre-specific conventions shape terminological formation and usage; how institutional actors attempt to stabilize terms through standardization; and how translators negotiate between communicative transparency and cultural authenticity. Methods include concordance analysis, collocational profiling, componential and frame-semantic analysis of key terms, and targeted interviews with professional tour guides and guide-interpreters. Results show that tourism terminology functions as a hybrid between technical nomenclature and persuasive discourse: a high proportion of terms are evaluatively charged and metaphorically extended, while culture-specific lexemes frequently remain partially untranslated or are adapted through loanwords and explicitation. Cross-linguistic comparison reveals asymmetric conceptual mappings in heritage, hospitality, and eco-tourism domains; these asymmetries correlate with culturally salient scripts and state branding strategies. The discussion proposes a functional typology of tourism terms—regulatory, infrastructural, experiential, and identity-performative—and outlines pedagogical implications for training guide-interpreters, including scenario-based instruction, corpus-informed glossaries, and graded translation tasks that foreground intercultural pragmatics. The article concludes with recommendations for terminological standardization that respect local cultural semantics while maintaining international intelligibility.