LE TOURISME ROUMAIN - STRATEGIQUEMENT OUVERT VERS L’INTERNATIONAL. L’EST-IL AUSSI VERS LA COMMUNICATION MULTILINGUE? (I)

One of the recommendations of the ELAN study (2007), which developed a pertinent analysis of the impact of linguistic incompetence on the economic performance, was to devote more extensive research on the impact of the language skills on other sectors of economy. We chose tourism, which is, according to the World Tourism Organization, one of the most important and dynamic sectors in the world, an engine for development, prosperity and welfare. Romanian tourism should follow the general tendency of Tourism Towards 2030; this perspective projects that the number of international tourist arrivals worldwide will increase by 3.3% per year between 2010 and 2030, reaching 1.8 milliards in 2030. Our study is structured in two parts, developed in two distinct articles. In the first part (I), a careful reading of the official documents that note the strategic directions in Romanian tourism for periods between 5 and 20 years confirm the openness of the Romanian tourism towards the international. However, we were surprised to notice the fact that, in these reference documents, the issue of foreign languages, vehicles for international communication, is ignored, if not completely obscure. Despite its strategic role, multilingual communication is mentioned only sporadically and is not granted a focused attention at any level - national, regional or local; it is not included in a detailed strategic program that could generate an added value indisputable in promoting tourism. In the second part of our study (II), we tried to capture the effects of this inconsistency on the practical aspects of tourism, specifically the virtual multilingual presentations of the hotels in Oradea, a municipality located close to the border with Hungary and therefore a multilingual and multicultural space par excellence. The comparison with a similar survey conducted in 2011 confirmed the same lack of interest for a simple, quick, sustainable and very profitable decision: that of having the sites translated into several languages. We shall try to identify some of the causes of this indifference, and also some solutions that could revitalize the activity of promoting tourism to foreigners, by a top priority revaluation of multilingual communication