Uncovering the Linguistic Issues in Tourism Promotional Texts: The Case of the Tourism Authority of Thailand's English Website
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Abstract
After the pandemic has ceased, high expectations have been raised for the tourism industry to generate quick and substantial income for Thailand as a remedy for the sluggish economy. The Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) plays a key role in informing and inviting foreign tourists to visit the country. TAT's official English website is another channel for the dissemination of tourism promotional texts (TPTs) to prospective visitors around the world. Quality TPTS are thus considered crucial not only for the provision of necessary information but also for the first impression of the country. This paper identifies linguistic issues found on the TAT's English website about the capital city of Bangkok and suggests revisions. The Bangkok webpage comprises 12 sub-menus, with a total of 232 sentences, all of which were used as data. Two assessors verified the analysed data to confirm the correct analysis. The study found syntactic and semantic issues at the word and sentence levels and stylistic issues at the sentence and paragraph levels. The syntactic flaw (79.22%) is found to be more problematic than the semantic one (20.78%). As for the stylistic mismatch, the TAT's English TPTs are not in line with the suggested web writing style consisting of the use of simple sentences, conciseness, one idea per paragraph, and the pyramid writing style. Basic revisions to maintain the original sentences were justified by an online English grammar checker QuillBot in order to improve the TPT's quality.
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