INTERPERSONAL DISCOURSE IN THE TOURISTIC GUIDE IN SPANISH AND GERMAN AND ITS IMPORTANCE FOR TRANSLATION

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to study the interpersonal discourse of tourism through its markers in the genre “Touristic Guide”, and the implications for the translation Spanish-German, from a constrastive perspective. To this end, a pilot corpus of 24,000 words has been analyzed, with three different sub-corpora: texts in German as original language, texts in Spanish as original language, and texts in German as translated language. We have analyzed how does the interpersonal discursive function work in this genre and in the sphere of tourism (Hyland, 2005; Suau Jiménez, 2012), by means of markers in both original languages. Then, the translated language has been scrutinized in order to evaluate whether it complies with the principle of pragmatic translation (Nord, 2007; Durán Muñoz, 2012), i.e. taking into account the interpersonal discourse in the target language of the translation. Results suggest that the texts in the original languages, Spanish and German, show relevant differences in the way in which they both materialize the interpersonal discourse, as well as the amount and kind of markers they use. However, German as a translated language reproduces the Spanish interpersonal discourse, not considering that of the target language. Therefore, it can be concluded that due to this interpersonal misuse, there may have been some damage in the expression of persuasion, essential for this genre, and therefore a certain limitation to attain its promotional function.