Terminographic Work in Translation: exploitation of a multilingual corpus of wellness and beauty tourism (Spanish‑English/French/Italian)

Abstract

The present thesis aims at confirming the hypothesis that today there is a need of terminological resources as documentation and terminology help for non-mother tongue tourist translation, especially in the subdomain of tourism called wellness and beauty. This hypothesis is divided into three sub-hypotheses: i) that specialized translation into non-mother tongue requires a thorough evaluation with the aim of assessing the quality of these translations; ii) that current resources for tourist-texts translation are not useful for solving certain terminological problems; and iii) that the subdomain of wellness and beauty tourism needs to be represented in a multilingual terminological dictionary.

To confirm or refute the aformentioned sub-hypotheses, the thesis is structured into four chapters. Chapter I deals with the description of the tourist sector in Spain, focusing on both its concept and its different tourist segments that have emerged from the beginning of the 21st century, paying special attention to the tourist segment called wellness and beauty. Furthermore, this chapter is also concerned with the description of online tourism promotion, the main tourist-emitting markets to Spain, and the current situation of tourist translation (above all, into non-mother tongue) as an independent subject in the degree of Translation and Interpreting in Spain. Chapter II is devoted to the process of compilation of the multilingual corpus, composed of three sub-corpora: 1) a comparable sub-corpus (TURISPA 1), formed by four components of source texts in Spanish, English, French, and Italian; 2) a professional parallel sub-corpus (TURISPA 2), whose component in Spanish constitutes the source texts, and of which the components in English, French, and Italian are translations of those previous texts extracted from promotional material (published entirely on the Internet) of the wellness and beauty segment; and 3) a semi-professional parallel sub-corpus (TURISPA 3), formed by a component of texts originally written in the Spanish language, and three other components of texts translated into English, French, and Italian carried out by undergraduate students of the final year of the degree of Translation and Interpreting. One of the main results of this chapter is the creation and compilation of the three sub-corpora and the classification of the most important mistakes detected in the two parallel sub-corpora.

The two last chapters are focused on the research line of terminology and terminography. Chapter III is devoted to the theoretical framework with regard to the research on terminology, as well as the terminographic work. Finally, in Chapter IV a protocolized methodology for the elaboration of a multilingual terminological dictionary is proposed with different phases by means of the use of the prototype called SpaTerm, developed and implemented by the Research Institute for Computational Linguistics (University of Wolverhampton). The fields contained in the database of this prototype were designed in the frame of this doctoral thesis, highlighting the field of terminological definition of the terminological units of the wellness and beauty sub-domain. That definition was elaborated thanks to a previous establishment of conceptual relations observed in the different components of the multilingual comparable sub-corpus.