This lecture discusses English to Italian translation in the tourism industry, referring to the broad concept of Language for Specific Purposes. Due to the contemporary globalized tourism market, students and professionals need to be proficient not only in terms of linguistic accurateness but also sensitivity towards culture when translating promotional and informative content (Katan, 2020; Maci & Sala, 2018). Achieving such type of translation competence requires tools that expose learners to authentic language use and intercultural discourse patterns. Thus, the lecture focuses on the use of corpora as a resource for improving translation competence. Alongside corpus-based methods, the lecture will also introduce students to contemporary AI-powered translation tools, encouraging a critical and informed understanding of how these can complement specialised translation practices. This approach allows learners to examine actual cases of English and Italian tourism discourse, determining how professional texts are structured, what words and collocations are most common, and how meaning is created across languages (RodrĂguez InĂ©s, 2009). Comparable and specialized corpora are especially useful in EnglishâItalian translation practice, as they enable students to recognize genre conventions, terminological trends, and translation equivalents within actual tourism communication (Giampieri & Harper, 2023). The workshop will explore corpus-based and AI tools that can support this type of specialized translation, with a particular focus on how nature tourism can be effectively mediated from English into Italian through the use of corpora. Source materials will include UK websites promoting nature tourism that are translated into Italian to reach Italian tourists as well. The workshop aims to teach students how to independently create and use purpose-built corpora based on their needs, using web-scraping tools. Students will thus gain more autonomy and critical consciousness as translators and will learn the ability to make evidence-based linguistic and cultural decisions when translating tourism texts.
References
Giampieri, P., & Harper, M. (2023). Tourism Translation: From Corpus to Machine Translation (and back). Umanistica Digitale, 119-135 Paginazione.
Katan. (2020). Translating tourism. In E. Bielsa & D. Kapsaskis (Eds), The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Globalization. Routledge.
Maci, S., & Sala, M. (2018). The language of tourism: An introduction to the topical issue. SCRIPTA MANENT.
RodrĂguez InĂ©s, P. (2009). Evaluating the process and not just the product when using corpora in translator education. In A. Beeby, P. RodrĂguez InĂ©s, & P. SĂĄnchez-GijĂłn (Eds), Benjamins Translation Library (Vol. 82, pp. 129â149). John Benjamins.
