'How this holiday makes a difference': the language of environment and the environment of nature in a cross-cultural study of ecotourism

Partendo dal presupposto che le differenze culturali spesso costituiscono una fonte potenziale di problematiche traduttive, questo contributo mira a evidenziare le differenze che emergono sul piano linguistico, a livello lessicale, ma soprattutto fraseologico, in seguito a variegati orientamenti culturali che agiscono come filtri. Il linguaggio specialistico analizzato riguarda una nicchia particolare del mercato del turismo, ossia l’ecoturismo, che sta conquistando un terreno sempre più vasto in seguito ad una maggiore attenzione rivolta nei confronti di tematiche attuali, come quelle di impatto ambientale. Abbracciando una prospettiva interculturale, il lavoro indaga il diverso approccio che la cultura americana, britannica e italiana mostrano nei confronti dell’ambiente e della natura, ipotizzate, in questo contesto, come categorie ideologiche del linguaggio utilizzate per la promozione dell’ecoturismo. È centrale allo studio la classificazione operata negli anni da Hall (1976; 1983; 1990) fra culture verosimilmente più orientate verso il contesto, come quella italiana, e quelle più orientate verso il testo, come quelle americana e britannica. Tale suddivisione comporta una serie di diverse tendenze, soprattutto comunicative, che caratterizzano le culture e quindi anche le lingue. Per esempio, ad una maggiore espressività dell’Italiano sembrerebbe corrispondere una comunicazione più informativa dell’Inglese britannico. I dati analizzati derivano da un corpus comparabile assemblato ad hoc che include testi scaricati da siti web ufficiali dell’ecoturismo. L’analisi parte da un approccio quantitativo basato sulla Corpus Linguistics, avvalendosi della teoria fraseologica che risulta rilevante anche a livello traduttivo. Emergono notevoli discrepanze fra le tre lingue nell’uso dei termini chiave del discorso. I risultati dell’indagine rilevano differenze di lessicalizzazione dei concetti fondamentali che sono parte di altrettanto diverse scelte fraseologiche nelle tre lingue. Il lavoro conferma l’importanza di come la pratica traduttiva possa trarre vantaggi da uno studio sistematico delle multiword units nelle lingue e culture

Treading lightly on the Earth. Metaphorical frames in the discourse of ecotourism

The present contribution aims to analyse the underlying metaphorical conceptualizations which frame the discourse of ecotourism and their similar or different surface realisations across languages and cultures (American English, British English and Italian). It addresses the issue of ideological categories construed by the discourse of ecotourism to promote its message in order to \u201cpersuade potential customers into becoming actual clients by addressing their cultural needs and personal motivations to travel\u201d (Edwards and Curado 2003: 26). Ideology, in this work, relies on van Dijk\u2019s (1998: 9) conceptualization as \u2018social cognition\u2019, namely a system of values, beliefs, thoughts shared by members of groups, which support their interests socially and organize their social representations cognitively. This implies that certain lexical items (e.g. travel*, holiday*, walk*, environment) can trigger metaphorical mappings. The data were gathered from an ad hoc comparable corpus of British English and Italian official ecotourism websites. Methodologically this research combines quantitative and qualitative analysis involving a number of steps. The analysis is quantitative when assessing the significance of some words on the basis of frequency criteria or when looking at collocational profiles statistically produced by the software. It is also qualitative in that it takes into account some aspects of language that, though not at the top of the numerical list, provide relevant linguistic insights. Many conceptual metaphors provide the structure for a systematized ideology of the ecotourist experience, which requires an extension of the notion of the tourist gaze to include other embodied and emotional aspects

“The whole is greater than the sum of the parts”. Metaphors of inclusion and exclusion in the British and Italian Fascist discourse of the 1930s

Abstract - The rationale behind this work lies in the current economic, political, and social turmoil and the crisis of modern democracies. Adopting a Cognitive Linguistics standpoint combined with Functional Grammar, the paper looks at metaphorical instantiations of nationalistic issues in the British Union Fascist press. The paper aims to ascertain what metaphorical frames are used to convey the totalitarian perspective typical of Fascist discourse. Being part of a wider project, a further aim is to look at similar metaphorical expressions in a less known magazine of the Italian Fascism called Legioni e Falangi. Findings show the presence of universal conceptual framings across cultures but through different lexicalizations as far as some metaphors are concerned

FRAMING ISSUES IN THE SPECIALISED DISCOURSE OF DIPLOMACY. A QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE APPROACH

This study explores the specialized \u2018territory\u2019 of diplomacy and, more particularly, it reports results on the cognitive frames used by British foreign ministers to pursue their ideological design. This work adopts both a cognitive and discourse-based perspective on the language of diplomacy assuming that the frames chosen allow speakers to negotiate solidarity with their audience and in so doing they \u2018naturalize\u2019 a number of ideological positions. More particularly, I will focus on those cognitive frames which prove to be statistically \u2018salient\u2019. Thus, quantitative methods developed in corpus linguistics will be used to support qualitative methods of critical reading of larger bodies of diplomatic-relevant texts

"The whole is greater than the sum of the parts". Metaphors of inclusion and exclusion in the British and Italian Fascist Discourse of the 1930s

The rationale behind this work lies in the current economic, political, and social turmoil and the crisis of modern democracies. Adopting a Cognitive Linguistics standpoint, the paper looks at metaphorical instantiations of nationalistic issues in the British and Italian Fascist press of the 1930s. More particularly, it explores what metaphors are employed in English and Italian to convey the notion of “totality” implied in the theory of totalitarianism. Furthermore, it investigates how metaphors contribute to the legitimation of inclusion and exclusion strategies which are at the basis of nationalism. Findings show the presence of universal conceptual framings across cultures such as PEOPLE ARE ANIMALS and NATIONS ARE LIVING ORGANISMS even though different lexicalizations were found due to cultural factors

Multilingualism, Lingua Franca or What?

For this 10th anniversary issue we are very fortunate to have two extremely engaging conversations. They are both frank discussions on the state of the art of translation and its relevance today. We open with Henry Liu, recently President of the International Federation of Translators and close with a conversation between renowned scholars Susan Bassnett and Anthony Pym, who muse - over a glass or two - about the monster that is called ‘translation’

Tracking the change in institutional genre: a diachronic corpus-based study of White House Press Briefings

Genre analysis mainly focuses on the description of language use in the different professional and institutional domains (Bhatia 2004). Due to the ongoing processes of internationalisation and globalisation genre boundaries are becoming less clear-cut (Candlin and Gotti 2004; Cortese and Duszak 2005), resulting in textual realization hybridity (Poppi 2007). Institutional communication genres have been experiencing in-depth transformation in the last few decades, mainly due to evolutions in the media market, fuelled by technological developments and by globalisation (Blumler and Kavanagh 1999). Since text is nothing but phraseology of one kind or another (Sinclair 2008), our aim is to uncover recurrent phrases in the White House Press Briefings to look at their diachronic variation and at the variables determining it. In other words, our main objective is to analyse how the discourse preferences constructing the podiums and the press in their way of projecting the referenced context and their subjectivity vary across 18 years. The data come from a corpus including all the Press briefings from January 1993 to May 2011. The addition of XML mark-up, including information about individual speakers and their role, allows us to compare different discourse strategies adopted by the participants at different points in time. This leads us to determine the extent of the differences in the patterns found as well as the nature of the variation. The analysis of keywords and key-clusters helps to identify the “aboutness” and the style in each presidency (Scott & Tribble 2006), and allows the access to the identification of “pointers to the typical structure of discourse” (Bondi 2010: 10) highlighting static strategic communicative clusters, organizational phrases dynamic markers of authorial stance and content clusters. The analysis relies on two pieces of software: Wordsmith Tools (Scott 2007) to retrieve key clusters and Xaira to study their distribution across the years. Our findings show a more prominent interactive presence of the podium as an individual in Clinton’s first term than in the following years. The dominant key clusters include mental and cognitive verb phrases (e.g. I don’t believe; I think) expressing a hedging function that is less prominent in Bush’s briefings, where the podium seems to perform only the ‘mediator’ role. In Obama a higher involvement of the speaker is confirmed by the key cluster I think the president not merely used to project an idea but rather to mitigate his assertions. The analysis further demonstrates that a speaker’s power of persuasion is greatly determined by an ability to shift in and out of various roles within and across ‘discourse spaces’. Thus, the exploitation of specific discourse strategies by political actors goes hand in hand with their political strategies. These are realized through the repetition of specific patterns and subtly conveyed meanings. Although the context plays its role (attenuation and boosting depend on the importance and delicacy of the topics at issue) the main strategy of communication has got pragmatic reasons. The different shades of the meanings of the mental verbs confirm that the genre of conversation is one of the main components of this institutional genre together with their hedging function typical of political discourse and in particular of political interview

When a relationship ends “there can be no turning back”. The divorce metaphor in the Brexit discourse

Brexit has inspired far more metaphors than it has solutions. Many conventional and novel metaphors have been used to frame this issue and the relationship between the EU and the UK. This paper addresses one of them: the divorce metaphor. Starting from the assumption that it is not the side with ‘the most’ or ‘best’ facts that wins but the one that provides the most plausible and reliable scenarios (Musolff 2017), this paper intends to explore how the metaphor of divorce has been used by British politicians and in British mainstream media with a view to influencing citizens when justifying political actions. Modelling our method of analysis on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Charteris-Black 2004), we try to demonstrate how the same metaphor becomes a powerful tool for disseminating different evaluative content and expressing criticism

Transcreation and the professions

In Cultus 6 David Crystal said "I don't expect my translator to be a mind-reader [...] knowing about the presuppositions and intentions underlying the utterances made by the participants". Issue 7 will focus on this very point. Who should translate, and who is translating the presuppositions and intentions underlying the utterances made by the participants in the real world? A term for this process is "transcreation", which has been used in the Arts (in particular poetry and drama) to talk about transposition into a different language or into a different medium (a poem is transcreated into an art form or onto the stage). Transcreation has also been closely linked with localisation, but differs in that a transcreator is expected to take much more account of the original language/culture/context than a localiser who will be 100% client or end-user oriented. As interculturalists should we agree or disagree with Crystal? Why should (or should not) the translator or interpreter be a transcreator? We would like contributions that focus on these issues, and in particular on these other (non) professionals such as crowd-sourced volunteer translators, fansubbers, international journalists, subject specialists with some foreign language understanding, cultural mediators, community interpreters and child interpreters. How important are they, and what sort of job are they doing? Also what, if any difference is there between these transcreators and translators/interpreters; and what should the profession be doing about accounting for the unsaid, for the presuppositions and intentions underlying the utterances