동아시아 변방의 한자화와 탈한자화— 마카오 고급 호텔명의 어휘적 특성 분석

Abstract

Macao, known as the “Las Vegas of the East,” is at the crossroads of Eastern and Western cultures, which integrates multicultural and multilingual elements, and is concentrating on the shift from casino business to cultural tourism business through the World Heritage Site. Hotels are no exception. Therefore, we aim to investigate lexical features of luxury hotel names in Macao, in terms of word density, word length, word frequency, and word translation and transliteration, using WordSmith Tools 8.0 and Voyant Tools 2.6.0. Due to the high frequency of the common name “Hotel (酒店)” and the place name “Macau / Macao (澳門),” the word density of the entire luxury hotel name was very low. The frequency of use of “酒店” was higher than that of “Hotel.” The Portuguese term “Macau” was used two times more than the English term “Macao.” All five hotels named “Macao” were those operated or owned by American or American multinational corporations. In the readability index, the English names of 5⁺ star hotels were the lowest, and the Chinese names of them were also short in word length and low in standard deviation. Comparatively, “Palace” was used for 5⁺ star’s, “Grand” for 5 star’s, and “Golden, Dragon” for 4 star’s. In Macao, there was a tendency to name the hotel “Palace” when opening a hotel of the same group. The Chinese name of the hotel is a translation or transliteration of English, Portuguese, French, Italian, Greek, Japanese, and so on. We could confirm that the two trends coexist in Macao, the edge of East Asia: one is Chinese characterization by the Chinese government and the other is de-Chinese characterization by global hotel companies progressing simultaneously with globalization.