Translating the Language of Tourism across Cultures: from functionally complete units of meaning to cultural equivalence

Some text types, such as tourist brochures are mainly characterized by the advertising function and aim to influence people’s behaviours by working at the level of personal values and beliefs (Katan 2004). This means that tourist translations should be successful and effective not only in terms of communication of a message but also in terms of advertising. In order to do that, the identification of the phraseology typical of this type of language should not be separated from those aspects that are relevant for the specific culture we want to address. This paper suggests combining two different methodological approaches (Manca 2008; 2009) in the search for linguistic and cultural equivalents in the English and the Italian languages of tourism: the Corpus Linguistics approach within the framework of John Sinclair’s view of language (1991; 1996) and Tognini Bonelli’s (2001) theories on functionally complete units of meaning, and the Intercultural Studies approach based on Hall’s ([1976] 1989), Hofstede’s (1991; 2001) and Katan’s theories (2004; 2006). This combination is achieved through a four-step methodology where the identification of functionally complete units of meaning across different languages (Tognini Bonelli 2001; Tognini Bonelli and Manca 2002) is followed by a further step where adequate translation equivalents are checked against the framework of interpretation of Intercultural Studies. In order to illustrate this new model of equivalence in the tourism domain 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). Results will show how the two cultures tend to adopt different types of promotion both from a linguistic and a socio-cultural perspective with important implications for the translation of tourist texts.