Nowadays tourism has become a global industry dominated by the use of English, the lingua franca of international communication and business. That is why many languages, including Italian, have borrowed and assimilated a large number of English words to refer to things and concepts connected to tourism. From a terminological perspective, however, Anglicisms used in Italian in the field of tourism, such as resort, location, check-in, and tour operator, are not ‘terms’ sensu stricto. According to terminologists such as Cabré (1999) ‘terms’ identify a single concept and unambiguously serve the communicative purposes of professionals in a specialized field. That is not the case of Anglicisms in tourism, which normally coexist with Italian equivalents (check-in/accettazione, low cost/basso costo, all-inclusive/tutto incluso). In some cases they develop new meanings and senses (residence, minibar, trolley) because of their integration into a new cultural context. Thus, variation occurs depending on users’ preferences and communicative contexts. In this paper some general and specialized dictionaries, both monolingual and bilingual, will be considered, in order to, firstly, verify equivalence between a selection of tourist ‘terms’ in English and Italian and, secondly, to check whether they offer information about usage and register variation. From the observation of usage data so far, English terms seem to be preferred because of their brevity and compactness in comparison to Italian equivalents, as can be noted for hub (snodo aeroportuale), leisure (tempo libero), overbooking (sovraprenotazione) and repeaters (clienti abituali). In the case of specialized terms, we hypothesise that the concept-term association which triggers and motivates the coinage of a term in English, often results in a lexical gap (or failure) in Italian, so that direct borrowing takes place.
Register variation in tourism terminology
PULCINI, Virginia
2012-01-01
Abstract
Nowadays tourism has become a global industry dominated by the use of English, the lingua franca of international communication and business. That is why many languages, including Italian, have borrowed and assimilated a large number of English words to refer to things and concepts connected to tourism. From a terminological perspective, however, Anglicisms used in Italian in the field of tourism, such as resort, location, check-in, and tour operator, are not ‘terms’ sensu stricto. According to terminologists such as Cabré (1999) ‘terms’ identify a single concept and unambiguously serve the communicative purposes of professionals in a specialized field. That is not the case of Anglicisms in tourism, which normally coexist with Italian equivalents (check-in/accettazione, low cost/basso costo, all-inclusive/tutto incluso). In some cases they develop new meanings and senses (residence, minibar, trolley) because of their integration into a new cultural context. Thus, variation occurs depending on users’ preferences and communicative contexts. In this paper some general and specialized dictionaries, both monolingual and bilingual, will be considered, in order to, firstly, verify equivalence between a selection of tourist ‘terms’ in English and Italian and, secondly, to check whether they offer information about usage and register variation. From the observation of usage data so far, English terms seem to be preferred because of their brevity and compactness in comparison to Italian equivalents, as can be noted for hub (snodo aeroportuale), leisure (tempo libero), overbooking (sovraprenotazione) and repeaters (clienti abituali). In the case of specialized terms, we hypothesise that the concept-term association which triggers and motivates the coinage of a term in English, often results in a lexical gap (or failure) in Italian, so that direct borrowing takes place.
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