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The appreciation of cultural and linguistic adjustments in multilingual museum audio tours by international tourists

Abstract This paper discusses the question of whether House's theory on a cultural filter can be applied to the study of the appreciation of multilingual audio tours. According to House theory, cultural and linguistic adjustments of a target text to a specific target culture will have a positive effect on the appreciation and understanding of the information provided. This study analyses the appreciation of British and German users of the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum audio tour. Based on an institutional ethnographic investigation of the coming about and, subsequently, a contrastive text analysis of the German and English translation of the Dutch source text, three audio stops were selected for a field experiment at the museum. Two alternative versions were made: one linguistic manipulation of the text and one content manipulation of the text. In the linguistic manipulation, one of the five dimensions of crosscultural differences between English and German was manipulated, namely, orientation towards content versus orientation towards persons. The texts were presented to 30 British and 30 German visitors of the Rijksmuseum. Responses were measured using questionnaires composed by a multicultural team of Dutch, English and German native speakers and translators. The results of this field experiment do not seem to give a clear answer to the research question. However, the differences found indicate a trend that the linguistic adjustments are more appreciated and the content adjustments are appreciated less than the original version of the text. The study encourages the discussion between multimedia producers and museum curators with respect to the standardisation or cultural adjustment of audio tour translations.