(MayAESLA2017)Knörr,Garikoitz & Miguel Fuster-Márquez "A Phraseological and Translatological Approach to the Analysis of a Basque, Spanish and English parallel corpus of hotel websites" (original) (raw)

The aim of this contribution is to present the principles which have guided us in the design of a parallel (English, Spanish, Basque) corpus of Basque hotel websites for lexicological, phraseological and translation purposes. After a thorough examination of the 311 hospitality websites listed in turismo.euskadi.eus (run by the Basque government), only 83 of them ended up being eligible for the corpus since they housed a version in all the three languages. Since our study involves a relatively small language (Basque) and a focus on a narrow field (hotel websites), one cannot expect to obtain a very large corpus, at least not in the sense the word “large” has acquired these days in corpus linguistics. Our corpus (compiled between 2015 and 2016) comprises a total of 184,033 words. We believe that its size and the number of websites which are part of our database are sufficient for a preliminary approach to the study of tourism discourse in Basque. Firstly, our presentation will describe the resulting corpus and the steps followed in the compilation process. For categorization purposes, we have followed the classification suggested by Fernandes (2006). Secondly, we need to discuss the phraseological component. Fuster (2014) claims “that the discourse of hotel websites has developed its own phraseological choices which are idiosyncratic and not widely shared with conversation, academic or other specialised registers.” Although that appears to be clear in the case of lexical bundles and phrase frames on British hotel websites, it might not be so in the case of Basque, a language in which, perhaps due to historical, structural and sociolinguistic reasons, genre-specific recurrent sequences might not be as abundant or easily identifiable as in English or Spanish. In fact, that is one of the hypothesis we hope to show by contrasting Basque and English to see the differences and similarities in the use of lexical bundles. And thirdly, our discussion needs to look at the very nature of the parallel corpora of such hotel websites. In this regard, a relevant issue might be whether or to what extent they do represent, for example, processes of localization or transcreation (cf. Brown-Hoekstra, 2014), where, as a global strategy, hotel website writers tailor their messages to get maximum efficiency in each of the three targeted languages, having different addressees in mind. In this presentation we hope to show some of our results at a preliminary stage.