Navigation and circulation in city audio guides: a comparison between Italian and English

The aim of this paper is to analyse Italian, British and American city audio guides from a contrastive perspective, in order to identify possible differences in the way(s) audio guides are structured in Italian and in English and, hence, to shed light on issues concerning the creation of English versions of Italian audio guides. The study takes as a starting point the set of guidelines provided by Neves (2015) to create accessible descriptive guides, and focuses on the aspects related to navigation and circulation. A corpus of fifty professional city audio guides is qualitatively investigated in order to determine the presence and distribution of features related to navigation and circulation, and to identify relevant strategies adopted in the audio guides to favour circulation and navigation. Differences between audio guides in Italian and in English are identified and discussed, and the findings are then compared to Neves’s guidelines. Finally, on the basis of the results, translation issues are addressed by providing a list of aspects that could be taken into account when producing English versions of Italian audio guides.