The language of tourism in English and Italian: investigating the concept of nature between culture and usage

This paper aims to propose an alternative approach to translation equivalence across cultures and languages using English and Italian corpora of farmhouse holiday web sites as cases in point. In order to do this, the methodology that has been used is the one suggested by Tognini Bonelli (1996b and 2001), Tognini Bonelli and Manca (2002) and Manca (2004). This kind of approach rejects a one-to-one correspondence between words and proposes to start by considering the collocational profile of a given node word in the source language (SL). In our specific case, although traditional reference books give more or less the same definition of the words natura and ‘nature’, the evidence of the corpora shows that in the context analysed and in the restricted language of farmhouse holidays, the two words cannot be seen as equivalents. The data taken into consideration for this analysis are drawn from two comparable corpora assembled at the University of Lecce. These corpora are made up of texts taken from web sites of British Farmhouse Holidays and Italian Agriturismi. If we compare the wordlists of these corpora we notice a dramatic difference in frequencies regarding the word natura and its prima facie English translation equivalent nature. And yet the two words referring to nature in English and in Italian are not usually perceived as problematic. This paper therefore sets out to investigate and highlight the differences in usage between these two terms, providing, at the same time, a new, hopefully useful, framework of analysis for other terms as well. (Oltre all'ISSN 1972-8247, il prodotto è anche dotato di un ISBN 88-7581-049-4, che il sistema non consente di inserire)