The Tuscan Paradise in E-Tourism: A Contrastive Analysis of Figuration in Italian Tourism Websites and Their English Renditions

Abstract

This chapter studies figurative language in Italian promotional tourism websites and their translations into English. It analyses figures of speech, such as metaphor, hyperbole, metonymy, and personification, within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics (Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Lakoff & Turner 1989; Lakoff 1993; Ruiz de Mendoza 1997; Ruiz de Mendoza & Pérez 2011). The aims of the analysis are, first, to investigate the relevance of figuration in original e-texts which promote Tuscany, and, second, to inspect whether web translators adopt the same strategies to persuade their readers in the English renditions. Results show the importance of figuration across languages and cultures, both for promoters and for translators. However, they also show how translators of promotional tourist texts can 1) omit to render figuration, 2) activate different conceptual mappings between or within new domains when rendering figuration, or 3) introduce new figurative language to increase the text's persuasive effects.