METM18 presentation 

Language, translation and tourism websites: a corpus-based study 


Giacomo Klein, Trieste, Italy
Kyriaki Kourouni, Thessaloniki, Greece


This paper aims to analyze the main linguistic and translation features in Greek texts and English translations thereof in Greek tourism websites.

Tourism is the most flourishing branch of the Greek economy and is also a key sector for economies within the Mediterranean area. A very large amount of language material is produced and frequently published on websites of tourism organizations and tourism- and travel-related agencies, which is why writing and translating for the web play a very important role in this sector.

Original texts and translations into English were collected from Greek websites and analyzed with TaLTaC2, a software package for text and corpus processing covering a wide variety of languages. A bottom-up approach was adopted, with particular emphasis on lexical, morphological, syntactic and rhetorical features as they arose from the automatic analysis of the collected corpora. The quantitative results were then used as the basis for hypothesis formation, leading to meaningful qualitative translation analysis that is easily replicable in many language pairs. Translation strategies implemented by translators – including explicitation, adaptation and omission – are pointed out in order to present tourism-specific translation characteristics and a locus where translation, adaptation, rewriting, transcreation and advertising converge and the roles of author, translator and editor become blurred.

We expect this study to raise major questions regarding tourism-targeted language material and lead to thought-provoking discussion by stakeholders – content authors, translators and editors alike.

About the presenters
 
Giacomo Klein is adjunct professor of modern Greek language and translation at the Advanced School of Modern Languages for Interpreters and Translators, University of Trieste, Italy. He is also a freelance translator and interpreter (working from and into Italian, Greek, German, English and French), a teacher of modern Greek at the Hellenic Foundation for Culture, and an examiner for the Greek Language Certification exams in cooperation with the Centre for the Greek Language.
 
Dr. Kyriaki Kourouni is a senior fellow of translation at the Department of Translation and Intercultural Studies, School of English, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece. She teaches courses related to scientific and technical translation, translation technology and translation methodology. She has over 10 years' experience in translation, subtitling and translator training. She is currently Board Member of the Hellenic Society for Translation Studies and Vice-President of the European Society for Translation Studies. She has served as Vice-President of the Panhellenic Association of Translators (2008-2010) and as a member of the Translation Technology Committee set up by the International Federation of Translators (FIT, 2010-2012).