Information Сapacity of Globalized Text Content: Museum Website as a Translation Object

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of translation and creation of globalized text content of an official cultural and leisure institution website on the example of museum websites. The relevance of this research is due to the need to enlarge the target audience of Russian museums which official websites do not still provide globalized versions in the English language, which the author argues to choose for the reason of its lingua franca status. High-quality text content focused on a global visitor can not only expand the target audience but also yield other benefits for cultural and leisure institutions. The author considers that pragmatics of a potential global recipient requires following certain principles while translating a text from Russian into English or while creating a globalized text based on the Russian original. This work is aimed at studying and analyzing whether the principles of textual information completeness and brevity, which the author views as the basic ones, are followed or not, and which rules are obeyed. The text material selected for analysis is presented by text content fragments displayed on the official websites of world-known Russian museums located in Moscow and St. Petersburg with annual attendance by a vast number of foreign visitors. It is revealed that text simplicity interrelated with text brevity is reached due to transformations at lexical and syntactical levels. The rule of textual information omission is mainly performed when the textual information is irrelevant for a foreign recipient.