Effectively Promoting Puglia in English: assessing mediation through the Seven Standards of Textuality

The translation of tourist texts can be considered a specialized type of cross-cultural communication (Agorni 2012: 5), which requires a certain degree of mediation since it involves negotiating into other lingua-cultures the cultural markers characterising a given destination. This study aims to investigate the degree and nature of translator intervention in two tourist mini-guidebooks promoting Puglia. More specifically, we will attempt to assess the effectiveness of the strategies adopted by the translator by using the Seven Standards of Textuality (De Beaugrande and Dressler 1981). The analysis shows that the translations of the two texts have different degrees of mediation. This lays the ground for future investigation of the translators’ profile and of the quality of Puglian translation system in the tourism domain.