Descriptive study of wine cultural references translation in German-Spanish wine-tourism promotional texts

Abstract

This paper is a contribution to the study of translation in the domain of wine production. Its first aim is to investigate the techniques employed in the translation of cultural units appearing in the promotional texts generated in Germany and Switzerland for wine tourism and, secondly, to apply the translation method which the translators rely on, as well as to explore the conceptual organization of the references involved. To this purpose, the data of a special-purpose bilingual parallel corpus (German-Spanish) have been quantitatively and qualitatively studied; this DIY-corpus consists of examples of the genre “wine-tourism promotional text”. The main findings point to i) cases of terminological variation in the German texts for which the search of Spanish terminological equivalents prove to be specially difficult; ii) the frequency of translation techniques with a high level of informativity (amplification and literal translation), although very special uses of the loans and adaptations are also documented, and iii) the interpretative-communicative method as the method of translation mainly used, even if isolated traces of the philological method were as well observed.