A STUDY ON THE CONSTRUCTION OF A THAI TOURISM CHINESE VOCABULARY LIST FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF CHINESE FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES

A CASE STUDY OF TRAVEL GUIDE TEXTS ON THE XIAOHONGSHU PLATFORM

Abstract

In recent years, Chinese young tourists have increasingly shown a preference for independent travel, a mode that grants travelers greater autonomy. When planning independent trips, Chinese tourists frequently consult travel guideposts on social media platforms such as Xiaohongshu. To gain a systematic understanding of Thai tourism-related Chinese vocabulary, this study conducts an in-depth analysis of tourism-related character and word lists, with the aim of refining the lexical system of Thai Tourism Chinese and proposing classification criteria for Thai tourism proper nouns This study collects Thai travel guide posts published on the Xiaohongshu platform between 16 February 2023 and 3 November 2025 to construct a Thai Tourism Chinese corpus. The corpus is processed through word segmentation, manual verification, and statistical analysis. Based on the corpus, a Thai Tourism Chinese character list, word list, specialized vocabulary list, and idiom list are compiled. Lexical analysis shows that the corpus contains 9,679 word types. The five most frequently used words are “的”, “泰国”, “是”, “不”, and “了”. After vocabulary level annotation, specialized tourism vocabulary accounts for the largest proportion, followed by Level 7 to Level 9 vocabulary. Within specialized tourism vocabulary, the most frequent items are “泰国” (Thailand), “曼谷” (Bangkok), “攻略” (travel guide), “普吉岛” (Phuket), and “泰铢” (Thai Baht). Furthermore, a systematic analysis of proper nouns indicates that they are mainly categorized into human geography, customs, and tourist attractions. Thai-specific proper nouns are primarily formed through transliteration or by adding “Thai-style” or“Thai”to general lexical items.