Starting from two corpora made up of English texts coming from the Lonely Planet travel guides of London and New York on the one hand, and of their Italian version on the other, this paper aims at focusing both on the most frequent collocations of the Italian words ‘viaggio’ and ‘viaggiare’, properly inflected, and, in a contrastive perspective, on their series of English translations. The software used to process the data gathered is the WordSmith Tools 6.0. Taking into consideration the English equivalents of ‘viaggio’ and ‘viaggiare’ reported in most Italian bilingual dictionaries and comparing the wordlists and collocations of these two corpora, we can observe a variety of English equivalents for a single Italian word and concept, which range from ‘travel’ to its main synonyms, from a denotative point of view – i.e. ‘journey’, ‘trip’, ‘tour’, ‘voyage’, ‘excursion’. Although their meanings overlap and the boundaries among them are not clear-cut, the analysis highlights that all these words have different connotations, applications and usages. The findings reached in this research through the study of collocational data allow both learners of English for Tourism and translators of tourism texts to choose the most appropriate equivalents of ‘viaggio’ and ‘viaggiare’ in real English usage, thus helping users of English for Tourism to avoid the most common lexical pitfalls. Furthermore, according to a comparative perspective, we may reflect on the fact that in the contexts analyzed the equivalence ‘viaggio’ / ‘travel’-‘journey’-‘trip’-‘tour’-‘voyage’-‘excursion’ recorded in bilingual dictionaries is not always demonstrated, but – reversing the point of view, from an ITA>ENG to an ENG>ITA analysis – English terms often correspond to some Italian synonyms of ‘viaggio’ – i.e. ‘giro’, ‘gita’, ‘escursione’. Therefore, this research represents an attempt to underline the difference between norms and usages, between the schematic and fixed equivalence reported in bilingual dictionaries under the entry ‘viaggio’ and the data drawing from our corpora.[...]
English equivalents of viaggio: collocations and usages in a corpus of tourism texts
VACCARELLI, FRANCESCA
In corso di stampa
Abstract
Starting from two corpora made up of English texts coming from the Lonely Planet travel guides of London and New York on the one hand, and of their Italian version on the other, this paper aims at focusing both on the most frequent collocations of the Italian words ‘viaggio’ and ‘viaggiare’, properly inflected, and, in a contrastive perspective, on their series of English translations. The software used to process the data gathered is the WordSmith Tools 6.0. Taking into consideration the English equivalents of ‘viaggio’ and ‘viaggiare’ reported in most Italian bilingual dictionaries and comparing the wordlists and collocations of these two corpora, we can observe a variety of English equivalents for a single Italian word and concept, which range from ‘travel’ to its main synonyms, from a denotative point of view – i.e. ‘journey’, ‘trip’, ‘tour’, ‘voyage’, ‘excursion’. Although their meanings overlap and the boundaries among them are not clear-cut, the analysis highlights that all these words have different connotations, applications and usages. The findings reached in this research through the study of collocational data allow both learners of English for Tourism and translators of tourism texts to choose the most appropriate equivalents of ‘viaggio’ and ‘viaggiare’ in real English usage, thus helping users of English for Tourism to avoid the most common lexical pitfalls. Furthermore, according to a comparative perspective, we may reflect on the fact that in the contexts analyzed the equivalence ‘viaggio’ / ‘travel’-‘journey’-‘trip’-‘tour’-‘voyage’-‘excursion’ recorded in bilingual dictionaries is not always demonstrated, but – reversing the point of view, from an ITA>ENG to an ENG>ITA analysis – English terms often correspond to some Italian synonyms of ‘viaggio’ – i.e. ‘giro’, ‘gita’, ‘escursione’. Therefore, this research represents an attempt to underline the difference between norms and usages, between the schematic and fixed equivalence reported in bilingual dictionaries under the entry ‘viaggio’ and the data drawing from our corpora.[...]I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
