RICERCA ITALIANA     

The language of tourism communication (Spanish-Italian). Lexical, pragmaic and intercultural aspects

Università degli Studi di Milano

Abstract

The project intends to analyse and describe the language of tourism used in the Hispanic area – including the Spanish-Italian contrastive perspective – in order to supply adequate instruments for professional activities such as linguistic-cultural mediation and translation. Particular emphasis will be placed on the intercultural aspects, on which the contemporary research on LSP is increasingly focusing.
The language of tourism presents a wide range of interrelated microlanguages (hotel industry, restaurants and catering; commercial transactions, transportation, leisure, history of arts, etc.) and includes an ample gamut of textual genres (brochures, tourist guides, catalogues, etc.). These encompass a multiplicity of registers and functions: from low-textuality commercial transactions with a strong international focus to descriptive texts in which the persuasive function is exerted more or less overtly and the tie between language and culture is highlighted. Actually, within the professional sphere of tourism the communicative processes necessarily turn out to be dynamics of interlinguistic and intercultural mediation concerning both the most tangible aspects of culture (arts, history, etc.) and the sociological and anthropological repercussions of the tourist flow.
Moreover, the growing importance of tourism as an emerging field of studies in Italian universities is to be stressed, namely in degree syllabuses with an emphasis on vocational training within the >>>

Principal Investigator

Maria Vittoria Calvi Università degli Studi di MILANO

Research Objectives

The project intends to analyse and describe the language of tourism used in the Hispanic area – including the Spanish-Italian contrastive perspective – in order to supply adequate instruments for professional activities such as linguistic-cultural mediation and translation. Particular emphasis will be placed on the intercultural aspects, on which the contemporary research on LSP is increasingly focusing.
For some years now, Spanish has regularly held second place in the choice of students in all Italian universities, and its study is becoming more extensive in secondary school. This new situation is related to various factors such as the intensification of commercial relations, the emergence of a more dynamic image of Hispanic cultures and a more important presence, in Italy, of the Spanish institutions for the spread of culture (such as the Instituto Cervantes). Nor should the growing number of Spanish mother-tongue immigrants in Italy be forgotten, thus creating new perspectives for study for contact sociolinguistics. To match this increasing contact between the two languages, there is still no adequate development of synchronic linguistics on the relationship between them. Although there is a considerable tradition of literary studies, Italian Hispanic scholars have shown a more discontinuous interest, even if it has increased in the last years, in linguistic studies. The suggested programme constitutes the first initiative of a national dimension collecting a >>>

First Results

The project’s starting point is the work already done in some of the operative units involved; the goals are to be reached in a two years term. However, subsequent in-depth studies and conclusions are planned.
The goals aimed to reach at the end of the project are:
- the created corpora will be largely representative of the language of tourism, taking into consideration the wide variety of text genres. They will not be huge corpora but small ones, parallel and comparable, which subsequently could be made up by other materials.
- The bilingual glossary will be constituted by a wide range of terminological cards with a high informative content, which will take into account the occurrences of the terminological units appearing in the different levels of specialised communication; it will be, however, a modular glossary, specialised in some lexical areas (as set up by the three working groups), that subsequently could be made up by other materials.
- From a theoretical-descriptive point of view, an essential contribution to the description of the language of tourism is aimed, as far as the lexical, grammatical and discoursive aspects are concerned; it is particularly expected to:
o Elaborate an exhaustive description (although opened to future additions) of text genres in the tourism area;
o Highlight the neologism creation as an expression of the healthiness of the field;
o Identify the relationship between the use of terminology >>>

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

All the participants in this project have been working, for some time, in the contrastive linguistics field in Spanish and Italian and teaching Spanish in Italy, as well as in the lexicographical sphere and that of specialised discourse, also through the use of computerised corpora. Evidence of this is the fact that they have regularly participated in the language sections of Conferences of the Associazione Ispanisti Italiani (Association of Italian Hispanists) and they have organised Conferences on Spanish linguistics themes (among the most recent - Mediación lingüística de lenguas afines: español/italiano, Forlì 2003, and Lessicografia bilingue e traduzione: metodi, strumenti e approcci attuali, Forlì 2005).
Many of the participants, moreover, have already executed some research projects on the language of tourism (see Calvi 2000 and 2006). The Milan Unit has already begun the compilation of an electronic corpus of tourist texts (web pages of Spanish Paradores and some Heritage Cities) and has organized a Conference focused on “Intercultural aspects of Communication in economic and commercial organizations” (Milan, November 2006), with particular regard to the tourist sector, where the first results of the research have been presented. In the Trento University – in the academic program of “Mediazione linguistica per le Imprese e il Turismo” supported by the Trento Province – some investigations are aimed at studying travel writings from the XVI to the XX century and >>>