This work addresses the issue of translation and culture by means of the analysis of cultural words or culturemes. The investigation is two-fold: on the one hand, it approaches the phenomenon of interculturality and, on the other hand, it attempts to describe the linguistic and translational aspects operating on the translation of tourism texts, which can be framed into an independent textual category. The corpus is composed of 714 culturemes extracted from the Lonely Planet tourist guides of relevant Spanish destinations. Those guides are written in English by an English-speaking mediator and the target reader is an English-speaking traveler. The mediator of this transcultural act is confronted with the difficulty of transmitting culturemes (some of them realia) that do not belong to the mediator’s culture. The main goals of the study are: 1) describing the translation strategies used for the transmission of culturemes from the Spanish culture; 2) carrying out a study of the most relevant semantic fields of the tourist text containing a higher range of culturemes and cultural foci; and 3) elaborating a taxonomy of culturemes based on the difficulties of translation. The study concludes that there exist different ranges of transmissibility and that the borrowing and the linguistic amplification are the most common strategies used by mediators, who are not able to convey 100% of the cultural info of these lexical items in every translational act.
Despite the relevance of the tourist industry in Spain, there is a lack of comprehensive studies of the tourism text considering both the anthropological and the translational approach. Previous studies focus on the quality of translations of tourism texts, as well as the level of acceptance of translations by readers. Thus, this work fills the academic gap and lays the foundations for future studies including localization as well as the translation of new tourism text typologies emerging from internet.