Ad-hoc specialized corpora in translation teaching: A progress report on the translation of web-based heritage tourism at the MA level

This paper shows how building a specialised corpus of heritage tourism texts (Heritage Tourism Corpus — HT Corpus) represents the ideal tradeunion between the need of developing lingua-cultural competence in a specialized language and training the ability of translating tourist texts from Italian to English especially when it comes to domain-specific terminology and cultural-specific items. The HT Corpus comprises texts from anglophone heritage tourism websites (approx. 1 mln words). It was built by professors at the University of Bologna as part of an MA course on English for Special Purposes and translation. This paper thus contains a progress report relaying preliminary findings from the classroom. Within this MA course, the use of the HTCorpus has a twofold aim: (1) letting students familiarise and investigate theESP of tourism by perusing the HT Corpus mainly with frequency lists, collocations and keywords; (2) aiding them in the translation of Italian heritage tourism source texts (STs) into English target texts (TTs).