"Immerse yourself in the traditions of the esimply way of life": analysing English translations of Italian agriturismi websites

This article aims to analyze and compare the Italian and the British languages of tourism, and the language used by translators in their translations of tourist websites into English. In particular, we will focus on mistranslations of collocations. The tools used for analysis are two sets of corpora: a comparable corpus made up of original Italian agriturismi websites and original British farmhouse holiday websites, and a parallel corpus made up of original Italian agriturismi websites and their translations into English. The theoretical framework adopted is the one proposed by Sinclair in his description of the phraseological approach to language. The results of the analysis show the importance of studying collocations across cultures and the strict relationship between language, culture, and promotional strategies

Discovering Language through Corpora: the Skills Learners Need and the Difficulties they Encounter

Most scholars agree on considering corpora as a valuable source of linguistic information for native and non-native speakers alike. Few researchers, however, have dealt with and systematically analysed the objective difficulties encountered by students while trying to exploit corpus data. The current paper describes a quantitative study of corpus consultation by learners and aims to establish whether different corpus analysis tasks can be considered to have different degrees of intrinsic difficulty. To this end, 26 corpus project work assignments produced by two different groups of students were assessed and tagged according to specific parameters that reflect the skills needed in corpus analysis. The data were analysed applying both parametric (ANOVA) and non parametric tests (Mann-Whitney U-test), which showed that, despite clear individual and teaching/learning environment differences between the two groups of students, the students’ results in most of the tasks were due to different levels of intrinsic difficulty. This led to the creation of a General Difficulty List of Corpus Analysis Tasks

Wine promotion on Facebook: a linguistic comparison of posts by producers from English-speaking countries

Facebook can be considered one of the main social marketing tools used by companies who decide to advertise their products online and who aim to keep in touch with customers quickly and effectively. Social media in general and Facebook in particular are characterised by a high level of interactivity, and visual, textual and linguistic features are strategically used to attract and involve potential customers and to get their feedback, thus enhancing the company’s visibility on the market as well as the company’s knowledge of the market. This paper analyses the language used to advertise wine and wine events through Facebook posts by producers from New Zealand, South Africa and the UK. Method-wise, this study applies the same analytical methods used by Manca (2021) in her analysis of the interactive and interactional strategies employed by Australian and US wine companies to advertise their products and activities on Facebook, and also some of the analytical methods used by Bianchi (2017a, 2017b) in her studies on Facebook posts written by travel agencies to advertise their destinations. Besides describing the metadiscursive features which are mostly used on Facebook by wineries (Hyland 2005), this paper aims to establish whether the forms of interaction and the positioning of the writers depend on cultural factors, on the medium used or on other variables