Is It the Same Country? Representations of Cambodia on Official Tourist Sites and in Tourists’ Comments

Larisa Shchipitsina

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. It shows that the difference in aims impacts 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 shows the predominance of cognitive items (compared with affective ones) in both sources types, but cultural items colored positively prevail in formal sources (and thus an elaborated image is developed) whereas different cognitive and affective items are common for informal sources.