Translating the Language of Tourism. A Corpus Based Study on the Translational Tourism English Corpus (T-TourEC)

This paper will present the preliminary results of an ongoing research project concerning corpora-based studies on the translated language of tourism. By employing a specifically designed corpus of translated tourist texts from a variety of languages into English and comparing it with a larger corpus of travel articles originally written in English, the analysis aims to identify potential differences in the discursive patterns and stylistic features characterising the translated language of tourism with respect to tourist texts originally written in English. By applying a comparable corpus methodology, the purpose of the work will be that of understanding the extent to which the discursive patterns of translated texts might affect or not the communicative functions, linguistic properties and persuasive effects typically employed in English tourist texts, in order to provide an interpretation of the functions and features (including universals of translation) characterising the translational practices of tourism discourse into English.