Translating the representation of the tourist landscape: A corpus-based study

Abstract

This paper will present a corpus-based study on the translated language of tourism, focusing in particular on the stylistics of tourist landscapes. Through a comparative analysis of a specifically designed corpus of travel articles originally written in English (namely the TourEC -Tourism English Corpus) and a corpus of tourist texts translated from a variety of languages into English (namely the T-TourEC – Translational Tourism English Corpus), the study will investigate a selection of collocates, concordances and keywords related to the description and representation of tourist settings in both corpora. The aim will be that of identifying differences, aspects or practices to be potentially improved that characterize the translated language of tourism with respect to tourist texts originally written in English. Results will show that the discursive patterns of translated texts differ from the stylistic strategies typically employed in native English for the linguistic representation of landscape and settings due to phenomena of translation universals, and that these differences may affect the relating communicative functions, properties and persuasive effects of tourist promotional discourse.