Where to stay in the UK and in Italy: a comparative study of the language of holiday accommodation advertisements

The aim of this study is to carry out a contrastive analysis of a corpus of tourist texts or rather of a series of sub-corpora: a comparable and a parallel sub-corpus, which respectively represents English and Italian tourism texts promoting different types of accommodation. My investigation aims to highlight sociocultural and linguistic similarities and differences between English and Italian tourism promotional texts and to verify whether their translations into the target language take into account obligatory features, standardised expressions, technical terminology and different cultural meanings, in order to create an independent message in the target culture and to fulfil specific communicative purposes. Sociocultural aspects, frequently used words, qualifying adjectives and translated expressions are aspects that will be examined by means of a freeware, multiplatform tool used to carry out data-driven corpus linguistic research, namely AntConc.

The first chapter analyses the language of tourism as a specialized language, taking into consideration its lexical, syntactic and textual features and providing some examples of technical terms and expressions drawn from my multilingual comparable and parallel sub-corpora. In addition to this, it deals with the topic of translation, describing some perspectives on it and the concept of "equivalence".

The second chapter is devoted to corpora - their general features, their different categories, some advantages they offer - and in particular, it describes the procedure followed to compile the corpora used in my study.

Finally, the third chapter reports on a preliminary text-based analysis which aims to identify the main sociocultural differences and similarities between English and Italian promotional texts and some further analyses about frequently used words, their concordances, qualifying adjectives and borrowings. At the end of the investigation, I will focus on my multilingual parallel sub-corpus to verify whether hypothetical rules associated of translation were followed to translate tourism promotional texts for foreign travellers. In some cases, I will also discuss some possible solutions to mistranslated terms and expressions.