It is available online at https://doi.org/10.36253/979-12-215-0061-5.13

Translating Heritage Tourism in Italy. Churches and Palaces of the Ducato Estense

Gaia Aragrande, Monica Turci1

1. Introduction

This article focuses on a project about the translation of heritage tourism. In particular it reports findings on a case study that started in 2018 and is still in progress. Its core part is represented by the translations prepared by thirty students who, between 2018 and 2021, enrolled in the course of English for Specific Purposes on the language of tourism and travel taught in the International Master programme Language, Society and Communication at the University of Bologna. The Segretariato Regionale del Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo per l’Emilia Romagna (henceforth Segretariato) provided the text to be translated into English that focuses on regional heritage. Henceforth this is referred to as Source Text (ST).

The translation task was presented as one of the exam options students could freely choose from. Unlike other options, this was meant to provide students with an added professional experience by giving them the chance to engage in an activity connected with the Segretariato, which has recently become a key public stakeholder in the Italian tourist sector. Students’ translations were collected in a corpus (TLC) that has been the object of study of a previous publication (Turci and Aragrande 2020); such translations were analysed through a Corpus-based methodology, namely using «Corpus Linguistic technologies to inform and elucidate the translation process» (Kruger, Wallmach, and Munday 2011).

This study builds on the authors’ afore-mentioned publication in two respects that concern the corpus and the research question. As regards the corpus, we will be using an extended version of the TLC (henceforth TLC-2021) that includes also the translations by the students enrolled in the academic year 2020-2021. At the same time this corpus is qualitatively more specific as it is limited to a selection of texts that describes churches and palaces belonging to the Estense heritage (1471-1598) in the cities of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio Emilia. This selection connects with the research question that explores a problematic issue that has emerged in our previous publication but has yet to receive full attention. This concerns the markedly frequent use of highly specialised terminology and Cultural Specific Items or CSIs (House 2006) from the field of art and architecture, as well as the use of academic style for texts that are meant for the global tourist market. The terminology issue immediately attracted students’ attention, as pointed out in a survey (see Turci and Aragrande 2020, 12-38); students found that CSIs in the field of art and architecture provided the greatest challenge in the translation process (ivi, 35). The extent of this problem also took us by surprise as the commissioner intended these texts for international visitors, hence we expected them to be more aligned to lexical and functional varieties usually found in the specialised language for tourism. This issue will be illustrated in more detail in the following paragraphs.

This paper will first outline the commissioner of the translations (Segretariato) and the translators (students, including a description of their profiles and competences). This descriptive part serves as contextual background to the analysis that will follow. Secondly, we will provide a detailed illustration of the ST in relation to its text type as well as syntactical and pragmatic features. Indeed, as it will be shown, such features hint at the hybrid position of the ST between the specialised discourse of tourism and that of art and architecture. The main part of the article will be devoted to the analysis of students’ TTs focusing in particular on the strategies they employed to translate terminology regarding art and architecture. The authors will also contribute suggestions for tailored translations to make specific terminology more suitable for an audience of tourists, without losing its specialised features, ending with a short glossary for the benefit of students and professional translators operating in the field of heritage tourism.

The aim of this work in progress is to provide some reflections on the translation of texts poised between the special language of art and architecture and heritage tourism that, far from being an exception confined to the Segretariato, has become a recurrent characteristic of the communication of heritage in the Italian public sector. The learner corpus that we compiled can be seen as a first step towards the construction of a larger corpus that could be used for research and teaching purposes, as well as providing a useful tool for translators. Furthermore, we believe that this area of study responds to recent developments in the tourist industry. If, on the one hand, the translation of heritage is a sub-sector of tourism translation that, in turn, is a marginal sector of translation studies tout court (Katan 2020), on the other hand, heritage serves an increasingly popular branch of tourism (Richards 2018), and one that is strategic for the sustainable goals of the UN 2030 agenda. Finally, we hope that our case study will provide some insights for further development of curricula in courses of English as special language with the aim of including theory and practice of translation for tourism that, as Katan (2020) and Agorni (2019) have noted, remains very rare, despite the wealth of published research work in this area.

2. Describing the project: Commissioner and Translators

This project started as a collaboration between the University of Bologna and the Segretariato back in 2018. The translations we are going to focus on were commissioned as a consequence of the impossibility of setting up an internship between these two institutions. At the time, the Segretariato, like several other public institutions coordinated by the Italian Ministry of Culture, was in a delicate and crucial phase following the re-organisation of the Italian public administration and, in particular, the transformation of the above-mentioned Ministry into the Ministry of Culture and Tourism (MiBACT)2. One of the most immediate consequences of this was that the Segretariato, and other cultural institutions, including museums and public galleries, added to their mission of protecting heritage, that of promoting it for the tourist market. The texts commissioned for translation are crucial in this process as they are part of the «Progetto Cantiere Estense»3, the Segretariato’s first attempt to put into practice the integration of old and new tasks, while at the same time marking the launch of its brand of cultural tourism. The emergence of the concept of «brand» itself is significant in this respect, as it provides an example of a public institution that, as a consequence of the reform, starts to behave like a private tour operator and adopts marketing strategies aimed at establishing the identity of its tourist offer, in order to meet the demand of potential customers (Radišić, Mihelić 2006, 185).

At the University of Bologna both teaching and research staff, as well as professional translators operating in various fields, were involved in the project with different roles and providing a variety of expertise. They included the course convenor, three different tutors and an English-speaking language teacher. The convenor and tutors provided students with different and complementary background knowledge for their translation work. The former has a long experience in teaching language for tourism as a specialised language and provided students with some introductory knowledge focusing on tourist discourse, its lexico-grammatical features and functions. Whenever possible, theory and practice were combined, thus actively involving students and encouraging them to reflect on forms of tourism and the tourist discourse that they encountered in the Target Language (henceforth TL). It was pointed out to students that, to produce good translations, background knowledge of the register, function and style of tourist writing in English was of central importance, forging in this way connections between writing and translating. This recommendation was also meant to orient students to privilege, whenever possible, instrumental TT-oriented strategies rather than documentary ST-preserving methods (Nord 2005).

Dann’s seminal publication (1996) on the language of tourism was adopted as the main text-book. Though this remains one of the most complete and accessible introductions to the properties, techniques and registers of the language of tourism, as well as an important study for scholars researching translation in this field (Gandin 2013), we felt this publication was not ideal to provide background information for students doing translations for the sector of heritage tourism; in some respects, some of its content could even be seen as misleading. As Dann makes clear in the introduction, the kind of tourist discourse his study focuses on is related to forms of mass tourism, while cultural and heritage tourism are instances of post- or even anti- mass tourism (Apostolakis 2003, 795; Francesconi 2007). For this reason, in the last academic year, a part of the course was devoted to the analysis of texts taken from the English National Trust website in order to present students with examples of heritage tourism discourse in the TL.

Each of the tutors involved in this project contributed a module on translation. Some changes were made from year to year in an attempt to improve preparation and respond to the difficulties students encountered. It was felt that the initial four-hour module on translation was not enough and hence it was later extended first to six and then to eight hours. Following a rethinking of the students’ background knowledge in the area of translation studies and practice, we decided to change the material used during the translation module in order to have more skilled students taking up the translation exam option. Given that in the first two years of the project, previous experience in translation was not a requisite (see Table 1), much of this module was aimed at unpacking the theory and practice of TT-oriented translation, with particular reference to the meaning and implications of covert translation (House 2006) and the related concepts of «cultural filter» and «Culture Specific Items» (CSIs), in order to foreground strategies and present examples of adaptation and localisation pertinent to the tourist sector. The workshops organised as part of the translation module provided a thorough illustration of functions in translation (Reiss and Vermeer 1984) aimed at showing that tourist texts use a medley of informative, expressive, conative and operative functions to offer a complement to Dann’s study that, by privileging examples of promotional tourist material, tends to concentrate on the conative function only and related strategies.

After the first year, following difficulties in providing adequate preparation for students with different backgrounds and in retrieving the final exam marks in English language in the BA course, requirements changed and it was made compulsory for students to have previous experience in translation from Italian into English. This proved a successful move in creating a smaller and more select group of students and also freed time for tutors to provide more and much needed information on online translation tools, which we think are vital for translators in general and in the tourist sector in particular. During the first year of the project, in fact, it was noted that, although all students were digital natives, the majority of them were not familiar with online resources for translation and none of them with corpora – with the sole exception of those who obtained a BA in translation. On discussing the final translations during the oral examination, it was found that these resources were only partially used and rarely to their full potential. As a consequence, tutors provided students with a list of online specialised dictionaries, tips for effective search engine usage, as well as an introduction to comparable and parallel corpora for translation, concluding the module with a hands-on session on the use of SketchEngine.

Concerning the students involved, a significant detail that has emerged in the second and third year of the project is a considerable drop in the number of students choosing the translation option and their reluctance to work in groups despite encouragement for collaboration from the convenor of the course. The drop in numbers could be explained in relation to the students’ perception of this task. In the first year, more than a quarter of the students opted for the translation task because of a mixture of interest in acquiring an experience that was closer to a potential future profession and also, probably, because they perceived the translation task as more familiar, and hence easier, than the other exam options. This tendency then changed completely because the translation proved to be an extremely difficult challenge that affected students’ final mark. This, along with a more effective selection, would explain the drastic drop in the number of students participating in this task in the second year and the fact that this trend continued in the third year.

Tab. 1. Description of the translation exam option across the three academic years.

3. The Source Texts

This section provides a general description the ST and in-depth analysis of its lexical, syntactical, and pragmatic characteristics. The former suggests an alignment of the ST with tourist discourse, while the latter problematises this, pointing to the ST as hybrid, somewhere between an academic discourse about art and architecture and tourist discourse.

The ST is composed of independent units which are meant to be read as such; each of these units describes a church or a palace relating to the Estense heritage and links to its location through the Tourer. This is a multifunctional tool; simultaneously a search engine, an interactive map that operates like Google Maps, and the digital platform that supports access to the ST, pinpoints the location of each attraction as well as introducing it discursively.

General reflections on the ST are based on the framework devised by Calvi (2010) for tourist discourse. Calvi’s genre framework is organised according to a hierarchical scale at the top of which are genre families, which group together texts sharing the same socio-professional context. Macro-genres follow and classify texts according to their medium and channel of communication. Genres – which may be embedded into macro-genres or not – take into consideration texts’ communication and pragmatic functions. Lastly, sub-genres focus on texts’ theme/s. The ST seems to fit neatly in Calvi’s framework. As it is written by a public organisation operating for the tourist market, it can be included in the institutional genre family. Furthermore, the ST fits into the macro-genre of the tourist web page as it is available only online through the Tourer website. As for its sub-genre, the ST is an example of a descriptive guide providing information about places of interest of the Estense heritage in the Emilia Romagna region.

The ST fits neatly into the category of tourist texts only empirically; however, analysis at the level of its lexis, syntax and function provides another take and highlights differences between the language used in the ST and that typically found in tourist texts. In particular, differences between the ST and the Tourer as regards syntactical constructions and pragmatic functions show that the latter is aligned to a specific kind of tourist discourse in a way that the ST is not. In line with its user-friendly and intuitive technology, the Tourer adopts a style that is also reader-friendly, characterised by simple and short syntactical constructions in stark contrast with that of the ST, as can be noted in the following example: «Eretto dalla comunità modenese a partire dal 1099 quale simbolo dell’indipendenza della comunità e quale luogo di conservazione delle spoglie del patrono Geminiano, è unanimemente riconosciuto come uno dei capolavori del Romanico italiano ed europeo». 

Where the ST has only the referential function, providing detailed information on single attractions with almost no mention of the traveller/ tourist, the Tourer’s texts use a predominant conative function typically expressed by the imperative mood, («Scopri i sentieri e i cammini …. Inizia il tuo tour …») to provide explicit suggestions to the travellers, reproducing a style that relates to the promotional function of tourist discourse, as described by Dann (1996). Furthermore, it should be noted that these invitations are not only aimed at selling the tour, but also at actively contributing to its experience and to the content of the website itself: «anche il viaggiatore può contribuire all’arricchimento del sito ….». Through a predominant conative function, the Tourer encourages its readers to add personal journeys, discover new routes off the beaten track, upload comments and photographs. Where the Tourer provides an example of texts in the making, and in the process of becoming increasingly heteroglossic and multimodal, the ST is not open to change or other voices; it is monoglossic and monomodal. The Tourer discursively frames its messages within a consumer-driven heritage experience (Apostolakis 2003, 796). Connections with cultural tourism and slow infrastructures in «Tourer.it è il portale per tutti coloro che amano viaggiare muovendosi in modo lento alla scoperta del patrimonio culturale diffuso dell’Emilia-Romagna» (https://www.tourer.it/chi-siamo, 22/12/2022) also provide hints of the Segretariato brand that is in line with its double mission to promote and to preserve the «territorial capital» (Moscarelli 2019, 237). The emphasis on slow, experiential and active tourism points to a segment of travelers/ tourists that are interested in a participated learning experience (Willson and McIntosh 2007, 75) that focuses on and, at the same time, preserves heritage, rather than in the fast consumption typical of a product-based form of mass tourism.

Comparative analysis provides further points of divergence, in this case between the ST and comparable contemporary tourist texts. The following interlingual comparison highlights differences in themes and lexical items that are at the core of some of the translation dilemmas encountered by our students. Table 2 shows an annotated description of Modena Cathedral in the Segretariato corpus against the entry found in the online website of the Lonely Planet. The fragments in bold provide the themes of the clauses, those underlined are the epithets referring to Modena Cathedral and those in italics are examples of specialised lexis found only in the ST. These elements add significant details that call into question the ST as a straight-forward example of tourist discourse.

Though both these texts are descriptive and have the same topic (or subgenre in Calvi’s framework), this comparison reveals differences. Where Themes in the Lonely Planet are, as expected in tourist discourse, simple Nominal Groups that refer to the cathedral or to parts of it as they appear today to visitors, the ST’s Themes are lexically dense and foreground temporality through adverbs, dates, and subordinate clauses that globally retrace the way the building of the cathedral progressed throughout the centuries. This structure is more aligned with an academic essay about art history rather than tourist discourse. The diachronic narrative of the Segretariato attempts to trace a continuity between the time of the Estense and our times as far as the function of the Cathedral is concerned; though this narrative is in line with the main theme of the Cantiere Estense Project, it is not expected in a tourist text, whose purpose is to provide up to date information to visitors.

Tab. 2. Interlingual comparison between ST and the description of Modena Cathedral on the Lonely Planet Website.

The use of euphoric language, which is one of the distinctive features of tourist discourse (Dann 1996, 65), provides another difference between the two texts, with the ST showing fewer examples than the Lonely Planet. Finally, though both texts make use of specialised lexis relating to art and architecture, the ST includes instances of this that cannot be found in the Lonely Planet (marked in italics). These instances express either an excess of specialised detail (at least in comparison to the description in the Lonely Planet, e.g. «apparato scultoreo»), or they are connected to the Estense period («apparati effimeri»).

In conclusion, students who took up this task were led to take for granted that the ST belonged to the specialised language of tourism and though Calvi’s framework for tourist discourse seems to provide a confirmation of this, closer analysis shows that this presupposition is problematic to say the least. The divergences observed above can be useful in raising awareness among students of the issues that they need to consider and may encounter right from the start of their translation process. Translators are faced, on the one hand, with the Tourer’s texts shaped to address a highly inclusive audience of experiential slow tourists and, on the other hand, with a ST that describes the Tourer’s landmarks through a very high degree of specialisation as concerns historical and architectural information and an academic style targeted at a selected audience of experts or amateur enthusiasts of the Estense period. Furthermore, after being instructed to model their translations on comparable Target Texts (TTs), students are faced with a ST whose structure, syntax and lexis are markedly different from tourist texts in the TL.

The following sections focus attention on the way students have dealt with one the problematic issues they have encountered, that is to say the translation of the specialised lexis of art and architecture for an audience of contemporary slow tourists.

4. Methodology and Corpora: The Tourism Learner Corpus 2021 and the ItSeg Corpus

This paper employs a combination of methodologies to analyse translations of tourist texts performed by students as described above in section 2. The two main methodological approaches featuring in this study are Corpus Linguistics (CL) and contrastive as well as qualitative analysis of students’ translations. The purpose of CL here is to extract specialised terminology as well as analyse translational patterns and/or mistakes in students’ translations. At a later stage in the study, evidence from the corpus will serve as a starting point for the contrastive analysis of students’ translations.

As mentioned in the sections above, students were faced with several challenges regarding the text type of the ST and the destination of the TT. As concerns the type of audience, given that the original environment of these texts is a publicly available website and that the texts are aimed at tourists, we have envisaged an audience of non-experts and this was communicated to students in their translation brief. Indeed, despite the highly specialised nature of the Segretariato texts, we asked our students to translate picturing a lay-reader as final user of the text, privileging simplification and normalisation whenever possible.

A further methodological aspect that is central to this case study is the role of Translation Studies (TS) in the field of Language for Specific Purposes (LSP). Indeed, the intersection of contrastive TS, CL and LSP can prove to be fruitful on many levels: research, but most importantly, teaching. Following Gandin (2016), we believe that the use of translation (both as a process/activity and as a product) should be rediscovered in the teaching of the LSP of tourism as a L2. Moreover, this case study shows how the use of CL tools can be beneficial in both research and teaching. As Gandin puts it:

[CL] can be effectively employed in contexts of L2 learners of English at university level in order to:

- explore and learn the different linguistic, stylistic and pragmatic properties of the language of tourism by means of authentic linguistic materials;

- recognise and understand the most/least successful strategies characterising the translation of tourist texts;

- discover corpus linguistics methodologies, notions, design criteria, technical tools and procedures for the collection, analysis and interpretation of complex linguistic phenomena, particularly when applied to the study of translation universals. (2016, 80).

The mixed methodology employed in this study can produce synergies from the classroom to the research group, using the first to feed the second and, in turn, the second to improve the first, creating a virtuous circle of knowledge which is by no means just theory-oriented but deeply rooted in practice.

Before describing the corpora employed here and their content, we should probably define their types and scopes. There are two corpora being used, one collects all the translations made by students (TLC-2021), the other one is composed of the ST the students translated (ItSeg Corpus). If we look at M. Baker’s treble typology of translation corpora (1995), «comparable», «parallel» and «multilingual», we cannot find an appropriate label for our two corpora. Indeed, they both have to do with translation but cannot be strictly defined as parallel (there is no alignment between ST and TTs, not at the corpus query level at least), and they are comparable to the extent that one is the translation of the other. This conundrum calls for a change of perspective and probably we could define both the TLC-2021 and the ItSeg Corpus as specialised corpora, adding the further label of «translational» or «learner» (see Turci and Aragrande 2020) to the TLC-2021.

As far the ItSeg corpus is concerned, its main function in this study is to provide a list of specialised terminology items that we then look for in the TLC-2021 using an excel spreadsheet, where we collected all the translations made by students aligned with the ST. As there are many versions of portions of the same ST, using the aligned version as a corpus would have been tricky as the process of building such a parallel corpus would have been very time-consuming. For this reason and given the small size of both corpora, we decided to discard the option of the multiple TTs parallel corpus.

Table 3 below contains information about the ItSeg Corpus. The latter and the TLC-2021 were both compiled using SketchEngine, which is the concordancer employed in this study.

Tab. 3. Info about TLC-2021.

The TLC-2021 is composed of texts regarding palaces and churches translated by students enrolled in three subsequent academic years (2018/2019, 2019/2020 and 2020/2021). This corpus was annotated with metadata regarding the students (group or single translators) and the year in which the translations were carried out so that translations can also be compared from year to year.

In Table 4 below, we include information about the TLC-2021.

Tab. 4. Info about TLC-2021.

We believe that the size of the TLC-2021 makes it hard to draw any conclusions but tentative ones. However, we believe that by comparing this corpus to a larger one (specialised and/or general) we might be able to isolate and identify peculiarities of the language employed by the students and, in turn, qualitatively analyse such peculiarities with the aim of determining whether they are simply idiosyncrasies or part of a lexicon of Italian art and heritage.

Regarding the way we exploited these corpora in our analysis, following McEnery and Wilson (2011), we claim that corpus-driven and corpus-based approaches do not exclude each other, but rather are complementary (see McEnery, Xiao, and Tono 2006). Indeed, the role of the corpora within this study is both to provide the starting point for the analysis (corpus-driven) and to substantiate and/or reject hypotheses made a priori by the analyst (corpus-based). The insights within ESP and the language of art and heritage in Italy, as well as non-professional translation settings, are obtained mainly through the exploration of keywords, concordance lines and collocational patterns, which the following section (4.) reports on.

In a contrastive perspective, keywords can provide a good starting point for analysis alongside the exploration of normalised frequencies and concordance lines. Finally, because of the small size of both corpora, concordance lines are quite manageable in numbers, thus we felt encouraged to qualitatively analyse them. We then start from an exploration of keywords in the ItSeg Corpus using the itTenTen2016 corpus as reference, as we consider keywords a statistically-relevant starting point for a more detailed and fine-grained corpus-based analysis (see McEnery and Hardie 2012; McEnery and Wilson 2011).

Both the TLC-2021 and the ItSeg corpora were automatically POS-tagged using a built-in feature of SketchEngine: the English and Italian TreeTagger PoS tagsets with Sketch Engine modifications (Jakubíček et al. 2013; Marcus, Santorini, and Marcinkiewicz 1993).

5. Analysis and discussion

As mentioned in section 3, we will start from two sets of keywords and key-terms extracted from the ItSeg corpus using the itTenTen2016 corpus as reference. Therefore, in the following sections we focus on keywords (4.1) and key-terms (4.2), putting to work the quanti-qualitative methodology that we explained in section 3.

Keywords in CL allow the analyst to highlight the «aboutness» of the corpus (P. Baker and McEnery 2015). Indeed, a keyword is «a word that is more frequent in a text or corpus under study than it is in some (larger) reference corpus, where the difference in frequency is statistically significant» (McEnery and Hardie 2012, 245). The comparison between the two corpora is carried out through significance testing that assigns a «keyness» score to each word; the higher the score, the more the word is typical to the corpus under study.

Our main aim with keywords extraction is to unveil peculiarities and potential idiosyncrasies of our ItSeg Corpus and identify items that might pertain to the art and heritage lexicon. In doing so, we will focus on both what is in the keyword/keyterm lists and what is not. To put it simply, we will look at presence as well as absence in both corpora, using the process of comparison to understand and evaluate what the corpus is not telling us instead of interrogating it just on what it contains (Duguid and Partington 2018). Indeed, «absence can have significant meaning» (Duguid and Partington 2018, 42), especially if considered in a comparative perspective within a specialised language by looking at the written production of learners and native-speakers of English, for example.

In sections 4.1 and 4.2 we report and discuss some of the keywords and key-terms extracted via SketchEngine. From the original extraction, we excluded the following items: names of people (e.g. first names like «Borso» or «Ercole» but also family names like «Este»), names of places (e.g. «Ganaceto» or «Rivalta» but also «Modena», «Ferrara», capitalised names of people’s jobs/titles in Italian (e.g. «Abate», «Duca» etc), year/centuries indications (e.g. «XI Century» or «eleventh century cf»). We decided to exclude these lexical items from the original extraction because being titles or names of people/places, they automatically result as salient compared to the reference corpora. However, their saliency is solely based on their uniqueness and they do not pose particular issues as far as their translation is concerned.

5.1 Extraction of specific terminology from the ItSeg corpus

Table 6 below collects keywords and key-terms extracted from the ItSeg Corpus which we sorted out using the rationale displayed in table 5.

As already mentioned in 4, keywords in a corpus generally highlight the «aboutness» of the corpus itself and thus give hints about which words/compounds are key in that particular corpus if compared to larger general corpora (Baker and McEnery 2015). Accordingly, here the keyword extraction tool was used to isolate lexical items, which orient research to specific tourism-art- and heritage-related SL-terminology. Indeed, we can see how the ItSeg Corpus shows (multi)terms that closely describe and provide specific information about the architectural and historical features of the objects they describe.

Tab. 5. Rationale for Keywords categories.

As our main focus is on the TLC-2021, we will primarily consider the terminology that surfaced through the extraction of keywords in the ItSeg Corpus with a twofold aim: first, to isolate specific terminology and check their translation with the TLC-2021; second, to provide a glossary (see appendix) that can be used by learners of ESP and students of specialised translation. For this reason, we mainly focused on categories 1 and 3 mentioned in table 5 above. While all 5 categories are important and may be the object of further analysis, as this paper focuses on church and palaces, we selected categories 1 and 3 in order to provide readers with an understanding of the specialised lexis of the ST and the solutions translators opted for. Table 6 below offers, however, the full picture of our categorised keywords extraction, as categories 2, 4 and 5 will be referred to in our open conclusions that will also address plans for further investigations.

The items in Table 6 are very varied even within the same category. We can appreciate how the first three categories are considerably richer in keywords and multiterms than the remaining two, especially if compared to category number 5 «tourism». Such a corpus-driven investigation of the ST is already very telling for the analyst. Indeed, by the lack of touristic markers such as hyperbolic adjectives, instructions or guidance, we can already infer that this text lies at the crossroads of different specialised languages, confirming the qualitative analysis in section 2. above. Given the space restrictions, we will be focusing our attention on a selection of keywords and multiterms for categories 1 and 3 and will analyse their translations performed by students according to the previously mentioned methodology. Our selection is based on thorough contrastive comparison between ST and TTs that led us to choose the most interesting cases and excluding those terms that we had already discussed elsewhere (Turci and Aragrande 2020).

5.1.1 Art and Architecture

In Table 7 below, we collected the keywords and multiterms pertaining to the first category «Art and Architecture». In turn, we identified four further sub-categories: «decorative», «architectural», «material» and «abstract». The first one collects terms connected with decorative elements (nouns such as «cornice», «lesene», «baldresche» etc., classifiers like «merlato», «corinzieggiante», «traforata» etc., and verbs like «ornare», «intarsiare» and «tamponare»). The second sub-category, «architectural», contains architectural elements and buildings (e.g. «timpano», «cupola», «terramare», etc.), while the «material» sub-category includes terms such as «cotto», «lapideo» and «scagliola» which crucially identify building materials. Finally, «abstract» includes nouns, verbs and noun phrases identifying either abstract processes or abstract elements that are not immediately attributable to a building and/or decorative element.

Tab. 7. Keywords and multi-terms from the Art and Architecture category divided according to sub-categories and type.

Before going into the details of the students’ translations, we would like to point out how the sub-categories in table 7 are not so strictly delimited and indeed, especially with reference to noun-phrases, they all present a degree of overlapping that made categorization harder and fuzzier. Moreover, regarding the terminology in table 7, we can appreciate how «Art and Architecture» as a category shows a high number of technical terms pertaining to the language of art and heritage as well as architecture. This once more confirms our first hypothesis about the ST, i.e. that despite being inserted in a website with clear popularizing and touristic scopes with regard to its audience, its content is highly technical and perhaps more apt for an audience that has a thorough and vast knowledge of these topics.

Moving now on to the translational analysis, we can appreciate how three out of four sub-categories within «Art and Architecture» feature mostly technical terms. These terms often do not pose issues as far as their translation is concerned, indeed they are often translated by means of equivalence (e.g. «abside» - «apse»). However, there are some terms that might be polysemous or variants of the same nouns (e.g. «volta», «volticella», «volticina», «voltone») or again synonyms (e.g. «ornare» and «decorare») and this, of course, makes their translation more challenging.

The sub-category labelled as «abstract» contains further interesting aspects to be explored in students’ translations. The nouns and noun phrases in this sub-category have very wide meanings and can apply to different contexts, therefore translators should choose the most fitting term depending on the context. Of particular relevance here are the nouns «configurazione» and «apparato». Often the translation of these nouns is made easier by the co-text and context in which they occur, so looking at those nouns as part of noun phrases like «apparato scultoreo esterno» or «configurazione rinascimentale» might help. Nevertheless, they are recurring nouns in the ST that students had to translate in a variety of ways.

Table 8 contains the translations of noun phrases containing the noun «apparato» that students came up with. As we can see, there are a few occasions in which students opted for a calque of the Italian noun, translating «apparato» with the noun «apparatus», thus proposing a 1:1 equivalence that mirrors the ST but represents nevertheless a mistranslation.

Tab. 8. Apparato» and its translation in the TLC-2021.

«Apparatus» describes a tool or a set of tools that is being used for a specific scope (e.g. «breathing apparatus»), moreover it pertains to a technical and frequently engineering- or medicine-related domain that has little to do with the LSP of tourism.

We can also appreciate how students made an effort to unpack the noun phrases containing «apparato» and explicate their meaning by means of periphrases or choosing a more fitting candidate for translation, such as «decoration» or «layout».

Finally, in the case of «apparato scultoreo esterno», some students opted for not translating «apparato», thus omitting this term in the TT while focusing their translation on the qualifier of the noun («scultoreo»). This process resulted in a more concise and precise translation candidate such as «sculpture».

Moving on to table 9 below, we can observe how students dealt with the noun «configurazione». This noun poses translation difficulties because it is often employed in a generic way but, if employed in some scientific domains, it identifies specific phenomena. This double nature of «configurazione» might confuse students, leading them to rely on direct equivalence as a translation strategy, thus choosing an equivalent/calque such as «configuration» without going through that unpacking process that is needed in order to grasp the meaning-in-context of the term at hand.

Despite this generalised tendency of using «configuration» as a preferred equivalent, some students showed a deeper understanding of the context and suggested translation candidates that take into consideration the object described by the noun-phrase (often a building, a church or their interiors). Depending on the type of object described in the ST, students opted either for terms such «layout» or «structure» or privileged the strategy of omission, thus delivering a more concise but nevertheless accurate translation (e.g. «configurazione a tre navate» - «with three naves»).

Tab. 9. «Configurazione» and its translation in the TLC-2021.

As already mentioned, we find several technical terms within the «architectural» sub-category. Alongside those terms, we can also observe a polysemous word «complesso» that can either function as a noun or as an adjective and has a meaning that can be difficult to grasp and often changes, depending on its context of use. Similarly to «complesso», the ST makes large use of the noun «corpo» (literally «body») employing it in a metaphorical way and in noun phrases, whose translation, once again, is highly context-dependant.

Tab. 10. «Complesso» and its translation in the TLC-2021.

In Table 10, we have collected the translations into English of the noun «complesso». The most frequent translation option is the noun «complex» which is a polysemous term like its Italian counterpart. «Complex» is an adequate translation option as it refers to «a large building with various connected rooms or a related group of buildings» (Cambridge Dictionary online) and, if we look at its collocational profile on either a specialised corpus of arts (e-Flux) or a general reference corpus (En TenTen 2020), we find collocates referring to buildings and architecture.

Some students, however, opted for different solutions like omission or substitution with pronouns or even simplification. Simplification tendencies are the most interesting, because they hint at the fact that students were actually trying to meet the requirements of the translation brief. Indeed, among the instructions they received was to translate the ST by keeping the target audience in mind – European tourists who access these texts through the Tourer website. By removing unnecessary information (e.g. just «buildings» instead of «complex of buildings») and/or substituting «complex» with a higher frequency noun (e.g. «group»), students facilitate the communication with readers and adapt their register and style to the target publication.

We would like to consider a couple of examples in which students chose translation candidates that are overly formal, like «architectural ensemble» and «palace», or, as in the case of «structure», simply misleading. «Architectural ensemble» is surely precise and appropriate as it indicates a harmonious unity of buildings, engineering structures and so on. However, it is a very infrequent, albeit specific, word combination (it appears only once in the EnTenTen2020) and also includes a borrowing from French that can represent a threat to efficient and broad communication. On the other hand, a noun like «structure» comes across as too generic and unspecific.

Tab. 11. «Corpo» and its translation in the TLC-2021.

Table 11 contains the translations of «corpo» intended as «part or section of a building». Here too we can observe diverging attitudes towards translation. Many students opted for a more conservative, yet correct, approach to the translation of this domain-specific item, e.g. choosing to translate «corpo di fabbrica» as «body of the building». Others found different solutions and more appropriate ones, opting for higher frequency words like «part» or maybe more precise ones like «structure», «section» and «wings». From what we see in table 11, the tendency to simplify, thus employing strategies like zero translation or omission, seems less frequent, although we find some instances of that (e.g. «building»).

5.1.2 Building, Restoring and Modifying

In table 12 below, we collected the keywords and multi-terms pertaining to the third category «Building, Restoring and Modifying». In turn, we identified two further sub-categories: «buildings» and «restoring and modifying». The first one collects terms dealing with architectural structures and containers known as building and palaces. This sub-category includes nouns, verbs and classifier as well as some multi-terms. The second sub-category, «restoring and modifying», contains nouns, verbs and multi-terms dealing with the actions of restoring and modifying architectural structures and containers.

Tab. 12. Keywords and multiterms from the building, restoring and modifying category divided according to sub-categories and type.

Before going into the details of the students’ translations, we would like to direct the reader’s attention to the double wording of «riammodernamenti» and «rimodernamenti» of the ST. Both nouns are nominalisations of the verb «riammodernare»/«rimodernare» (modernise, refurbish), but with a different spelling. This inconsistency in spelling happens to be just one of the many inconsistencies our students had to face while translating this ST.

For reasons of space, we will mostly focus on nouns and multi-terms starting from the latter. Table 13 contains three multi-terms and their respective translations in the TLC-2021. Of particular relevance here are the first two multi-terms, «opera di ampliamento» and «lavori di ampliamento», as these two are very close in meaning; one can go as far as saying that these two terms are near synonyms. This synonymity is reflected in the translations provided by students who chose to translate these multi-terms with noun phrases like «extension works» and «expansion works». A query in the enTenTen20 corpus reveals that both noun phrases are more or less equally occurring and they refer to the same process of enlarging an already existing structure, so they are indeed synonyms. By looking at the combined frequency per million words (0.1), we immediately realise that they are quite infrequent, probably because they are very technical expressions in a very large corpus of general English. Nevertheless, by looking at the context of use of these noun phrases, it is clear that the students provided an accurate translation that is perhaps technical and therefore not exactly in line with the style of the Tourer. Only one student opted for a repurposing of the ST noun phrase into a verb («to enlarge») which actually makes the sentence more readable and fully conveys the meaning of the ST’s multiterm.

Tab. 13. «Opera di ampliamento», «lavori di ampliamento» and their translations in the TLC-2021.

Concerning the other multi-term in table 13, «arte edificatoria», we can observe how the majority of TTs opted for a literal translation, while only one TT proposes a simplification that is convincing enough although not too precise in terms of vocabulary.

Let us now focus on table 14 containing nouns (mainly nominalizations) that revolve around the semantic field of building renovation and refurbishment. All the other items in table 14 present the prefix «ri-/re-» that hints at a repeated action or a change in status operated by an external actor. All these nouns refer to a process of repurposing or renovation of buildings.

We can observe how often «rinnovamento» and «rifacimento» are treated as close synonyms (and in this case they mostly are) by students who indeed favour «renovation» as main translation candidate. Indeed, the term «renovation» seems to be appropriate as it refers to making something old look new through some kind of intervention and of course is very frequently employed in the field of architecture. Some students however chose «renewal», which could be an appropriate translation if the object of renewal was wider and more abstract (e.g. urban renewal or contract renewal). Though not a mistranslation, employing «renewal» shifts the text to a level that goes beyond the single building or piazza refurbishment and hints at larger endeavours of changing the face of a city, for example.

Turning now to «restauro», the only point worth mentioning is that some students showed a tendency to over translation (see Vinay and Darbelnet 1995, 16). Indeed, especially with the periphrasis «in fase di restauro» (undergoing restoration) and the adjective + «restauro» many chose to translate «restauro» as «restoration works» (0.09 fpmw in the enTenTen20). Once again this is not to be considered a mistake, but a simple over translation as the term «restoration» alone would have conveyed the intended meaning in an appropriate manner.

Tab. 14. «Rinnovamento», «rifacimento», «restauro», «riconfigurazione» and their translations in the TLC-2021.

The last items in table 14 are «riconfigurazione» and «ridisegno», which are once again very close in meaning. As concerns «riconfigurazione», all TTs report «reconfiguration» as the only translation candidate. While this term is surely appropriate in this case, it must be noted that, especially nowadays, «reconfiguration» often pertains to the IT field and is very abstract in its use (political and social systems reconfigurations, for example). On the other hand, «reconfiguration» is also to be found in the lexicon of the building industry, especially occurring with «refurbishment». A third option could have been to use a verb like «repurpose» or a noun like «modification», which are more common and less tied to IT.

Finally, «ridisegno» in one instance was translated as «redrawing», which is a translation that is borderline between acceptable and wrong. Indeed, most commonly, «to redraw» refers to geopolitical processes and only on very few occasions is found to refer to architectural redesigns.

6. Conclusion

This paper has provided an illustration of a project in progress that concerns the teaching of translation of heritage tourism to Italian students enrolled on an international Master Course. Translation of heritage tourism represents a marginal sector in translation studies, but one that is strategic for the Italian cultural industry and contemporary tourism in general.

In the first part, the article provides a context for the commissioner that explains some peculiarities of our texts and translation problems encountered by students. The ST commissioned was markedly different from those of the Tourer and comparable descriptions found in English guidebooks. Qualitative analysis and ST keyword extraction has shown that typical features of language of tourism hardly featured in the ST (see also Table 6 above that illustrates the low incidence of tourist terminology). This, we think, is a consequence of the fact that our commissioner (and probably several other Italian public cultural institutions) is at a critical juncture in the process of adapting to its recent role of promoting cultural heritage for the tourist market. This is an aspect that we think is important to point out to students when introducing the ST as it is directly connected with their translational choices. The changes that the commissioner is currently facing calls for a kind of translation that also includes elements of adaptation and transcreation (Gaballo 2012) that need to be introduced to students and that we hope will improve the quality of the translations.

The learner translational corpus built during this timeframe concentrates on specialised lexis of art and architecture for tourism. It will lend itself to further investigations that may, for example, include a diachronic exploration of the corpus. Admittedly, the size of the TLC-2021 made it hard for us to draw any general conclusion, but our methodology combining keywords extraction and close reading of parallel texts led us to identify some trends and patterns in students’ translations that might be worth further investigation. Indeed, we were able to isolate and identify peculiarities of the language of the ST and the TTs and, through qualitative analysis and comparisons with larger corpora, we suggested other translational options and included the most salient ones in a glossary that we plan to extend in the future and hope can be of use to students and translators in the field of heritage tourism.

Appendix

A selected glossary of terms and noun-phrases

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Websites in order of appearance

https://www.beniculturali.it/comunicato/verso-un-nuovo-mibact-in-vigore-la-riforma-del-ministero-primo-giorno-di-applicazione-della-riorganizzazione 22/12/2022.

https://cantiereestense.it/cantiere/ 22/12/2022.

https://www.tourer.it/chi-siamo 22/12/2022.

1 Aragrande is the author of paragraphs 4 and 5. Turci is the author of paragraphs 2 and 3. Paragraphs 1 and 6 have been co-written by the two authors.

2 See https://www.beniculturali.it/comunicato/verso-un-nuovo-mibact-in-vigore-la-riforma-del-ministero-primo-giorno-di-applicazione-della-riorganizzazione 22/12/2022.

3 See https://cantiereestense.it/cantiere/ 22/12/2022.