On Translating Art and Heritage Discourse from Italian into English: From a Learner Corpus to a Specialized Corpus

This article reports on a pilot study aimed at providing information on the translation of heritage tourism texts from Italian into English conducted by Italian-L1 university students with an advanced knowledge of general English. It is the result of a collaboration between the University of Bologna and public and private organisations operating in the field of tourism. It has been created and coordinated by three members of the teaching staff working for the course of the language of tourism as specialised language in the International Master Degree in “Language, Society and Communication”: the convenor of the course, a teaching assistant who is also a scholar researching in translation and corpus linguistics and a native speaker language teacher. The organisations involved that have provided texts are the Segretariato Regionale del Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo per l’Emilia Romagna (henceforth Segretariato) and I.TA.CA Festival of Sustainable Tourism (henceforth I.TA.CA). This pilot study was presented to the class as one of three exam options students could choose from. For this reason, in this paragraph we will refer to the corpus of texts commissioned as “translation option”. In order to map students’ profiles and attitudes during the translation, students had to answer an online questionnaire created via Google Forms aimed at obtaining data for this sample of participants that, we believe, will prove significant for future developments of our study.