Promoting Venice through digital travel guidebooks: a case study of texts written in English and in Italian

The city of Venice is currently advertised using the Internet as its main ‘market’ place, the promotional message being conveyed in Italian and in English used as a lingua franca, addressing not only prospective tourists from English-speaking countries as also tourists who use English to communicate outside their country. Considering the role of Italian and English in the promotion of Venice, the present study contrastively analyses digital travel guidebooks, written the two languages, all available online. The contribution examines, in particular, instances of the ‘languaging’ technique used to describe the most peculiar aspects of Venice and its local culture. Dann (1996: 184) describes ‘languaging’ in tourist texts as “the impressive use of foreign words, but also a manipulation of the vernacular, a special choice of vocabulary, and not just for its own sake”. In this respect, Venice is full of cultural and dialectal characteristics that do not have a literal translation in standard Italian or in a foreign language. Therefore, the work investigates the strategies used to promote Venice’s local culture to non-Venetians as well as to non-Italians, thus considering whether the linguistic techniques employed may vary according to the different levels of presumed previous knowledge that the authors attribute to the visitors according to their nationality.