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Referencias culturales: Retos en la traducción de la fraseología y del lenguaje de especialidad
Editado por Mireia López-Simó, Pedro Mogorrón Huerta y Analía Cuadrado-Rey
[IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature 43] 2024
► pp. 184–205

Ad-hoc specialized corpora in translation teaching

A progress report on the translation of web-based heritage tourism at the MA level

| University of Bologna, Italy |
This paper shows how building a specialised corpus of heritage tourism texts (Heritage Tourism Corpus — HT Corpus) represents the ideal trade-union between the need of developing lingua-cultural competence in a specialized language and training the ability of translating tourist texts from Italian to English especially when it comes to domain-specific terminology and cultural-specific items.
The HT Corpus comprises texts from anglophone heritage tourism websites (approx. 1 mln words). It was built by professors at the University of Bologna as part of an MA course on English for Special Purposes and translation. This paper thus contains a progress report relaying preliminary findings from the classroom. Within this MA course, the use of the HT Corpus has a twofold aim: (1) letting students familiarise and investigate the ESP of tourism by perusing the HT Corpus mainly with frequency lists, collocations and keywords; (2) aiding them in the translation of Italian heritage tourism source texts (STs) into English target texts (TTs).
Keywords: translation teaching, Heritage Tourism, cultural and linguistic competence, Corpus Linguistics, specialised translation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Heritage tourism: UNESCO and the UNWTO
    • 1.2Heritage tourism in the Italian context and its ties with translation
  • 2.Specialized translation, the LSP of tourism and Corpus Linguistics
  • 3.Ad-hoc specialized corpora in the translation class
    • 3.1The Heritage Tourism Corpus
    • 1.1Using the HTC in class
      • Task 1.Observing a word list and making hypotheses
      • Task 2.Reading and sorting concordance lines and analysing collocates
      • Translation Task 1.Analysing a translation
      • Translation Task 2.Checking a translation equivalents — is this the right choice?
  • 4.Preliminary results
  • 5.Conclusion
  • References
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