When the study of meaning became a linguistic discipline, the main interest of semanticists was in the technical level of language and the major focus was represented by the single word. A different view of the relationship between language and meaning was provided by Malinowski (1923) at the beginning of the 20th century. The meaning of language was interpreted in terms of context of culture and context of situation. Malinowski’s theories influenced linguists such as Firth (1957) and Halliday (1985) and language became to be considered meaningful only if considered within the language events in which it is used. For this reason, language started to be analysed only in authentic contexts: the focus of interest is not the single word any more but the meaningful relations words enter into with the other words around them (Sinclair 1991; 1996). The main theme in this book is meaning: how meaning originates and how meaningful communication can be established in texts.

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).

The linguistic product of a specific cultural group, such as a joke, or any other humorous observation, can be rightly interpreted only taking into account the source context of culture, that is to say the setting, the scene where it has been produced and the context of situation, that is to say who has produced what and how. The strict relationship between language product and context implies that in the translation process this product is subject to change in order to be adapted and made accessible to the target audience. The aim of this paper is to analyse how some of the wordplay used in the original version of the film Wreck-it Ralph have been adapted into the Italian version Ralph Spaccatutto and which strategies have been used in the adaptation process of humour across languages and cultures.

The creation of a promotional website for tourist products is far from being an easy task. In fact, the target of tourist promotion is almost always international and multicultural, and this involves the presence of several cultural determinants in the promotion process. Ethnocentricity is always a risk in cross-cultural marketing activities, because those strategies that are successful in a country (or within a culture) do not always work abroad (or in a different culture) (see Prime 2003). For this reason, this paper performs a linguistic and cultural analysis of the strategies adopted (and that should be adopted) by British and Italian tourist facilities, such as farmhouse holidays, hotels and campsites in their websites. The methodological approach used for the analysis (Manca 2008; 2009; 2012) starts from the identification of word patterns according to a Corpus Linguistics approach (Sinclair 1991, 1996; Tognini Bonelli 2002) and interprets the functionally complete units of meaning thus identified, through the cultural filters elaborated by Intercultural Studies theorists (Hall 1989; Hofstede 1991, 2001; Katan 2004, 2006). The node words considered for analysis belong to the semantic field of the five senses which, as evidence suggests, are frequently used by Italian tourist websites to promote tourist products.

This paper aims to describe the phraseology associated with adjectives in the language of tourism. The adjectives appearing in the word list of a British farmhouse holidays corpus were grouped into three different semantic fields (‘description of rooms’, ‘description of surroundings’, and ‘description of food’) and from which their collocational profiles were then identified. In order to compare and contrast the Italian and the British languages of tourism, we searched an Italian comparable agriturismi corpus for items that are used to describe rooms, food, and surroundings. The results are discussed with reference to Sinclair’s theories on the influence of context and register on language choices (Sinclair 1991), and Hall’s theory of high vs. low context cultures (Hall 1976, 1989; Katan 2003). This analysis shows that the language of tourism is highly phraseological. It also gives insights into some differences and similarities between English and Italian in terms of ‘language systems’ and cultural orientations.

La traduzione audiovisiva si rivela come un processo molto complesso a causa della difficoltà da parte del traduttore di trasformare il prodotto di partenza in un prodotto di arrivo dove l’interazione di canali e codici abbia lo stesso scopo comunicativo e lo stesso significato del prodotto di partenza ed abbia, dunque, successo presso l’audience di arrivo. Il traduttore audiovisivo deve, inoltre, cimentarsi con complessità e strategie differenti in base al tipo di traduzione filmica che deve effettuare: la traduzione dei dialoghi in forma orale, vale a dire il doppiaggio, oppure in forma scritta, ovvero il sottotitolaggio, entrambe governate da regole testuali e formali ben precise. Questo articolo prende in esame la versione originale inglese e quella tradotta in italiano del lungometraggio di Walt Disney Gli Aristogatti. Il principale intento dei casi di studio riportati è quello di delineare brevemente le caratteristiche delle forme di traduzione audiovisiva, quali il doppiaggio e il sottotitolaggio e di fornire alcuni esempi pratici che possano portare a una maggiore comprensione di alcune delle complesse sfaccettature di cui il traduttoreadattatore deve tenere conto. Le sezioni riguardanti il sottotitolaggio e il doppiaggio sono precedute da un approfondimento delle strategie di traduzione dei nomi propri dei personaggi, che come vedremo ricoprono un ruolo significativo e rilevante nella trasmissione del significato di un prodotto filmico come quello Disney (Garzone 2007).

This paper aims to analyse the homepages of four official tourist websites, namely the websites which promote Italy, France, Germany, and New Zealand according to a new framework, labelled here as ‘Cultural Communication Grammar’. This methodological approach combines the approach of Multimodal analysis (Halliday 1978, 1984; Kress and van Leeuwen 2006) with the framework provided by Intercultural studies (Hofstede 1991, 2001; Hall 1982, 1983; Brake et al. 1995; Katan 2006) and aims at classifying the cultural features represented on official tourist websites through the analysis of language and visuals. Findings reveal that cultures systematically select definite linguistic and visual communication modes in the way they describe their cultural values, exchange information between participants and structure the messages which carry the content of the communicative event.

Tourism is more than just a leisure or professional activity; it can be considered the representation and discovery of the cultural identity of a country. The concepts and the words which are selected to promote a tourist destination, as well as the accompanying images and the way these modes of communication are organized in a website, inevitably reflect more than just a promotional aim. They mainly represent those social and cultural choices which are peculiar to each country and to each culture, and which are, for this reason, particularly worth investigating. This book proposes an original approach to the study of tourism discourse by combining several methodologies and models: Halliday’s systemic functional grammar; Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar; the AIDA model; the corpus linguistics approach; Hall and Hofstede’s models; and the theories of the universals of translation. The result of this new and complex methodological approach is a detailed linguistic and socio-cultural overview of the most common strategies of persuasion adopted in the tourism discourses of countries such as Italy, Great Britain and Australia. This book will be useful for academics working in the field of multimodal analysis, corpus linguistics, cross-cultural marketing, and cross-cultural studies, and for students of tourism, communication, and marketing studies.

abstract This paper aims to analyse the phenomenon of synonymy from a corpusbased perspective. Synonymy has been the object of research of many linguists (Cruse 1986; Lyons 1981, 1995; Carter 1998; Pearson 1998; Biber, Conrad, Reppen 1998; Partington 1998; Tognini Bonelli 2001) and many of them agree on the need to consider selection restrictions to identify semantic incompatibilities between apparently synonymous words. In this paper the investigation of synonymy is pursued by studying the behaviour of four adjectives, ‘set’, ‘situated’, ‘located’ and ‘placed’, in the English language of tourism. The data used for analysis are taken from a corpus made up of British Farmhouse Holiday websites. Collocates of the four node words have been identifi ed and grouped into four semantic fi elds that have been labelled General Location, Specific Location, Measured Location and Convenient Location. The semantic fields identifi ed for each collocational profile have been compared and contrasted in order to detect similarities and differences of usage. The results will show that although these four words are apparently synonymous and are reported as such by some monolingual dictionaries, their patterns of association reveal some differences in usage which act as constraints in the substitutability process. A corpus approach to synonymy may have interesting pedagogical implications in that it guides students to understand the importance of considering typical phraseological patterns and contextual relations in the identifi cation of the meaning and usage of words.

Tourism has become one of the most important sectors in the global economy and is often considered one of the main tools which may help promote the economic, social, and cultural growth of a country. Until recently, tourism has been studied particularly from a sociological perspective (Dann 1996; Boyer and Viallon 1994) and only in the last few years the language of tourism has been extensively researched (Author 2002, 2008, 2011, 2012a, 2013; Calvi 2005; Fodde and Denti 2005; Cappelli 2006, 2012; Maci 2010, 2012). New theories on this type of special language show that it is highly phraseological and also characterized by a close relationship with the cultural values of each country. As a consequence, if the main aim of tourist language is to attract customers from all over the world, experts in the field should be trained both from a linguistic and a sociocultural perspective. However, neither the phraseological approach nor the influence of culture on language are adequately taken into account in the tourist training domain, and textbooks dealing with English for tourism still tend to focus on single words rather than on phrases: they provide lists of words according to specific semantic fields, such as transport, accommodation, time out and so on. Furthermore, different ways in which similar concepts can be verbalized by different cultures are not even mentioned or taken into account. However, as Halliday (1978) argues, having a good knowledge of a language is not enough because social and cultural contexts constrain the use of words. As a result, language should not be considered as constituted by single words but by phrases and texts within communities. For this reason, lexis and the meaningful relations that words entertain with other words within different contexts (Halliday 1985; Sinclair 1991) should be at the basis of language teaching and learning. In the light of this phraseological and socio-cultural approach to language, we will briefly overview some of the textbooks used in Italian high schools and university courses to teach English for tourism, and will propose additional activities for students. The relationship between language and cultural aspects will be considered particularly within the teaching of English for tourism in university language courses.

The relationship between language and culture is an interplay between linguistic choices and cultural filters; if we accept that language is an expression of culture, i.e. of the beliefs, customs, behaviours and rituals constituting the cultural identity of a group of people, then it is crucial that phraseology and cultural features are not separated in the analysis and production of meaning. This paper combines two different methodological approaches to the study of meaning (Manca 2008; 2009): the Corpus Linguistics approach within the framework of John Sinclair’s view of language (1991; 1996) and the Intercultural Studies approach based on Hall’s ([1976] 1989) theories and Katan’s (2004; 2006) framework of High and Low Context Cultures features in transactional communication. The two levels of analysis allow the researcher to carry out both a quantitative and qualitative analysis. Examples that show the validity of this combined approach will be derived from a number of corpora of different subsections of the British and Italian languages of tourism. We will see that the two cultures tend to adopt different types of promotion in terms of linguistic devices (for example use of concrete nouns vs. abstract nouns) and features of description along a continuum which sees at one extreme explicitness and simple facts and at the other extreme implicitness, feelings and opinions.

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.

Abstract – Cultural and linguistic mediation has a role of utmost importance in the process of the integration of migrants into new communities and systems. The activity of mediation starts with and is realized through language, which is the main and most important means of communication between the members of a society and the medium through which reality is experienced and reflected upon. Mediators operating in immigration contexts are, therefore, requested to possess high-level linguistic and cultural skills in order to facilitate migrants’ access to services and benefits such as healthcare, school, or to the hosting country’s legal system. However, the linguistic training of mediators has to focus on a language which is characterised by terminological, syntactic and stylistic complexity being a combination of different languages such as legal language, language of medicine, or of the school system and which is strictly interrelated with the notion of register variation and genre features. This article aims to analyse the language of the Italian website Portale dell’Immigrazione supported by the Italian Ministry of the Interior in collaboration with Poste Italiane (Post Office) and Anci (the national association of communes) dealing with procedures and guidance for visa and permit applications, the language of the Immigrazione e Asilo section on the official website of the Italian Interior Ministry and the language of a section of the British Home Office website, UK Visas and Immigration whose role is to make decisions about who has the right to visit or stay in the country. The texts available in the above mentioned websites will be collected in two comparable corpora, that is to say two collections of texts having in common topic, text types and communicative function. These corpora will be analysed by means of a piece of software for linguistic analysis with the aim of identifying the most frequent words and their patterns of usage in each language and a set of translation equivalents across the two languages. The approach and the tools used in the analyses will prove to be valid in the training of linguistic mediators with important implications on the mediators’ level of specialisation, fluency and pragmatic accuracy