Translation Errors in Vietnamese-to-English Tourism Documents: Evidence from a Hanoi Travel Company

Abstract

Tourism publications must serve two functions: provide useful information to passengers while also presenting a destination, a service, and a culture to readers from other countries. This study examines Vietnamese-to-English translation problems in real documents from a tourism company in Hanoi, Vietnam. It inquires about the types of flaws that emerge in the papers, what the staff believes is causing them, and what difficulties overseas clients describe. The design is a mixed-methods case study that draws on Nida’s equivalence theory, Skopos Theory, and House’s translation quality assessment. The data was gathered from 15 tourism documents, 15 staff interviews, and comments from 20 overseas clients. The documents had 85 mistakes, including lexical (44.7%), grammatical (25.9%), cultural (17.6%), and stylistic (11.8%). Staff cited minimal translation training, severe workloads and tight deadlines, a lack of a shared terminology resource, insufficient proofreading, and unequal inspection of machine or AI output. Customers highlighted issues with cultural content, information clarity, understanding of services, and the company’s perceived professionalism. The sample is from a single organization, the participant groups are tiny, no inferential tests were performed, and the mistake coding was not validated by a second rater, hence the results explain this specific example and should not be interpreted as causal or industry-wide. They do argue that translation quality in tourism is dependent on linguistic, cultural, technological, and organizational safeguards that operate together.