In this chapter, the authors adopt a corpus methodology to examine how business tourism promotional guides are written in their original language. Two examples (one in English and one in Spanish) are carefully examined according to a classification of verbal and non-verbal elements. First, the authors explain in the introduction the methodology of the study. They then continue with the analysis and description of the comparable corpus. Two promotional guides (one in English and one in Spanish) were selected for this purpose. For each of them, non-verbal elements are analyzed (fonts, text arrangement, symbols, images, colors) as well as verbal elements (voice, mode, types of sentences, verb tenses, adjectives, adverbs, personal pronouns, possessive determiners, and modal verbs).
TopIntroduction
Analysing how texts are written in other websites is necessary to see how much similarity or variation there actually is. This will allow us to examine diverse forms of translation practice and ultimately leads to enhancing it. In fact, it is a very useful methodology that can be applied for research purposes as we will do in this book, but the results obtained are very valuable also for translation practice. This is in line with what Bowker (2002, p. 43) stated regarding the use of corpora by professional translators:
“Translators generally compile and analyze corpora when conducting terminological research. In addition, when translating a document, translators typically gather and consult corpora of parallel texts […] for guidance with regards to appropriate style, format, terminology, and phraseology” (Bowker 2002, p. 43).
Following Bowker and Pearson’s size recommendations for specialized corpora (2002), we compiled a parallel corpus of 35,000 words, which was divided into two subcorpora. These texts have been found online since we believe that the Internet has become an essential tool in business tourism communication. Indeed, as stated by González-Pastor and Candel-Mora (2018), technology allows tourists or participants of business tourism to immediately access any kind of information from different mobile devices and to actively engage in the tourist experience by giving their opinion and leaving their comments on different sites and social networks. Moreover, using the internet to generate our corpus entails that the texts chosen reflect real communication among professionals from the field, since it is the information they have access to.
We followed the same process adopted by Moreno-Pérez (2018, p. 68) to analyse the main features of the corpus:
Three levels of analysis:
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Typology of the business tourism discourse regarding grammar, form and level of specialization.
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Translation techniques used to transfer the information.
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Type of relationships created between source term (ST) and target term (TT).
TopFirst Stage: Analysis And Description Of The Comparable Corpus
In order to determine the difficulties that the translation of promotional business guides from the public and private sector entail, we should first analyze how are these texts written in their original versions, that is, when they have not been translated from one specific language to another. This is the reason why we have decided to dedicate a chapter of this book to studying the form and features of this text type, so as to later determine if the translated versions are closer in form and structure to their original partners or if, on the contrary, they stick to the target culture of the language to which they have been translated. In order to clarify what we refer to when we talk about this text genre, we have adapted the definition given by Suau and Labarta of a tourist guide (2017, p. 1): A promotional business guide is a genre with a promotional function, which is carried out by persuading the potential client to choose a destination to hold a conference, meeting or any other event in which business transactions will be completed among different clients.
This first stage is based on the study of a comparable corpus made up of two texts that have been written originally in English and Spanish, whereas the second stage will focus on the translation of this text type from English into Spanish (parallel corpus). In 2002 Hunston established a classification of eight different corpus types:
Figure 1.
Hunston’s (2002) classification of corpus (own elaboration)