Balancing Persuasion and Politeness:Translating Commands on Official Tourism Websites

This study explores how commands are linguistically realised in non-translated English and Greek official tourism websites, and how cross-linguistic differences are managed in the English translations from Greek. While imperatives are often highlighted as key linguistic features of tourism texts, other forms of command realisation are frequently overlooked, such as modulated and bound clauses. This emphasis on form over function has created a gap in our understanding of how tourism messages are constructed cross-linguistically and how politeness is conveyed in these texts. Using a corpus-based methodology with data from Visit Britain and Visit Greece, this study examines the distribution of command realisations, instead of simply imperatives. Results indicate that the English tourism texts show a stronger preference for imperatives and use low levels of modulation. In contrast, the Greek texts balance imperatives and modulation, typically at a median level. Translators appear to successfully adapt the target texts in terms of the frequency of imperatives but not the level of modulation. The findings suggest that the interplay between directness and politeness is complex, underscoring the importance of intercultural pragmatic awareness to enhance the promotional effectiveness of tourism texts.