Intelligibility of English on Signs in Tourist Attractions in Thailand

บทคัดย่อ

Due to the fact that one of the main sources of Thailand’s income is from tourism, this paper focuses on the use of English on signs in 40 tourist attractions across Thailand. The research aims to find out to what extent the variety of English in Thailand, so-called Thai English, is intelligible to non-Thai people. If non Thai people cannot understand English used by Thai people well, why it is there? The study was drawn from 1,828 photos of Thai English signs. The signs were broadly divided into grammatical features and lexico-semantic features. Then, 30 signs were carefully selected and divided into three levels based on the degrees of the mistakes, namely, Level 1: no errors (socio-culturally unintelligible), Level 2: minor errors, and Level 3: major errors. Then the 30 items were made into an online questionnaire about the intelligibility of Thai English. The data were collected from 456 participants who were
asked to rate a Likert scale of comprehensibility ranging from 1 incompressible to 6 comprehensible. The results were based on the statistical analysis and interviews with 29 participants. The findings showed that, first, English messages with grammatical features could be more easily understood than those with lexico-semantic features. Second, regarding items in Level 1 (socio-culturally unintelligible) and Level 2 (minor errors), native speakers generally had higher mean scores of intelligibility than non-native speakers, because native speakers could negotiate the meanings of Thai English better. Nevertheless, third, when signs contained major errors (Level 3), being native speakers did not play a role, because it was difficult for non-Thai people to understand the messages anyway. Fourth, most of the English translations in Level 3 were done by translation software. The interview data revealed that translation software was not helpful in conveying meaning to the participants. It can be concluded that Thai English could be intelligible to non-Thai people to some extent. However, to have a better understanding of Thai English messages, international visitors should bring the contexts around the messages into account rather than focusing only on the literal meanings of the messages.