Where to stay in the UK and in Italy: a comparative study of the language of holiday accommodation advertisements

The main conclusions that can be drawn at the end of this study are related to the fact that countries, their culture and their language are closely linked with each other. According to this perspective, it could be argued that the language used to promote tourist resorts changes according to the type of accommodation in question and the culture of the travellers whom it addresses. First of all, equivalence in terms of translated words should not, and often cannot, be established at just the word level, but it should be established at the wider level of units of meaning, taking into account both the context and the co-text as integral parts of the text itself. Besides, from the analysis it emerged that the linguistic strategies adopted to "seduce" Italian or English tourists are rather different. As a matter of fact, Italian owners prefer focusing on emotions and feelings through the use of implications, whereas English owners tend to describe what the hotel can offer to tourists and all the information they need is explained in the text and can be easily identified in it. Also the linguistic strategy of borrowings - which play a crucial role in representing a certain tourist destination and in influencing the readers' perception of it - is employed in different ways depending on the semantic field to which words belong, the type of accommodation and the reader's culture. Moreover, from the corpus-based analysis which has been carried out qualifying adjectives proved to be more frequent in English than in the original Italian texts. As a matter of fact, while, on the one hand, the English syntax allow for the use of different parts of speech as pre-modifiers, that is, the right-to-left construction, in Italian the characteristics and features of hotels are usually expressed by means of other linguistic elements, such as abstract nouns, or even through the use of implications, which can stimulate the tourist's imagination. Nonetheless, the Italian texts contain a large number of adjectives, but they are not very frequent and do not rank high on wordlists, as an excessive use of repetitions of the same words would not be acceptable in Italian. All things considered, it has been said that most of these translated promotional texts are comprehensible by English speaking tourists, yet they in some respects are inadequate, as they do not take into account the obligatory features they should display, such as standardised expressions, technical terminology and different cultural meanings. It is believed that while these aspects could be described as minor ones, they are likely to detract from general credibility.