Corpus Linguistics and Intercultural Studies: A combined perspective in the translation process

Some text types, such as tourist brochures, present to the translator a high degree of complexity: translation strategies strictly depend on the communicative function of advertising, which is the desire to influence people’s behaviours, by working at the level of personal values and beliefs (Katan 2004). A tourist translation which faithfully recreates the source text with equivalent target-language patterns is not necessarily a successful translation. Promotion strategies are linked to the context of culture, and as a consequence show different degrees of variations across cultures. The aim of this paper is to show the importance of a combined quantitative and qualitative approach in the analysis of translation issues of promotional texts (Manca 2008; 2009). The combined approach we suggest considers Corpus Linguistics and Intercultural Studies theories, which together may explain how and why to use certain linguistic devices and what effect these may have in the advertising process. For this reason, our corpus data will be interpreted according to Sinclair’s (1991) theories on the influence of context and register on language choices, and within the framework of Intercultural Studies, and in particular of Hall’s theory of High vs. Low Context Cultures (Hall 1989; Katan 2004) and Hofstede’s (2001) value orientations. In order to illustrate this new approach we will select a number of node words in the Italian Agriturismi Corpus (IAC) and will look for cultural translation equivalents in the British Farmhouse Holidays Corpus (BFC).