INVESTIGATING THE USE OF ENGLISH IN TOURISM SIGNS AT SOME TOURIST PLACES IN NORTHERN VIETNAM

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the use of English in a specialized type of discourse - tourism signs. Data for the research include 203 tourism signs collected from 8 tourist places in Northern Vietnam. These signs were examined in terms of the overall quality (visibility, reader-friendliness,
designs and illustrations) and the quality of the English used. As for multilingual signs, only the English content is analysed. Major problems of English used in tourism signs are found in spelling and grammar, lexical choices, equivalence in terms of contents between the Vietnamese texts and their English translated versions, pragmatics and styles. Based on the findings, some suggestions to improve the use of English in tourism signs are discussed in the final part of this paper.