Is It the Same Country? Representations of Cambodia on Official Tourist Sites and in Tourists’ Comments
Abstract
This paper explores how a certain country is described on official tourist sites whose main aim is to achieve more tourists (formal communication sources), and in informal tourists’ comments, who want to exchange their opinions. The paper suggests that the difference in aims of tourists impacts on the construction of country image, as a set of different items reflecting real aspects of a certain country. The semantic and contextual analyses of Russian and German formal and informal tourism related sources indicates a predominance of cognitive items (compared with affective ones) in both source types, but cultural items shown as positive prevail in formal sources (and thus an elaborated image is developed) whereas different cognitive and affective items are common for informal sources.
Keywords: Country image, cognitive items, affective items, communication, tourists’ comments