'Immerse yourself in the traditions of the simply way of life': analysing English translations of Italian agriturismi websites

One of the basic notions students trained to be translators are taught is that translation is communication between languages and across cultural boundaries (Ulrych 1999; Katan 2004). The complex process includes accounting for the cultural and the social context of both source and target texts, the communicative function of the texts, the source and the target language with their differences and similarities, the nature of the source text in terms of textual elements, grammar and lexis. This implies that the translator should be familiar with the meaning of signs in both languages, in order to avoid using signs taken from a source-culture in the target language, thus compromising the cross-culture communicative process. This article aims to analyze and compare the Italian and the British languages of tourism, and the language used by translators in their translations of tourist websites into English. In particular, we will focus on mistranslations of collocations. The tools used for analysis are two sets of corpora: a comparable corpus made up of original Italian agriturismi websites and original British farmhouse holiday websites, and a parallel corpus made up of original Italian agriturismi websites and their translations into English. The theoretical framework adopted is the one proposed by Sinclair in his description of the phraseological approach to language. The results of the analysis show the importance of studying collocations across cultures and the strict relationship between language, culture, and promotional strategies. (oltre all'ISSN 1722-5906, il prodotto è anche dotato di ISBN 9788883032530, che il sistema informatico non consente di inserire)