Travel insurance policies: a ‘playground’ for training transculturally-aware translators

The purpose of the present article is to analyse the suitability of employing travel insurance policies terms and conditions in the context of a specialised translation course at university level so as to develop translator professional competences. Instead of carrying out a text selection based only on experience, tradition or intuition, which are frequent criteria to include text types in the syllabus of this kind of courses, we present a study based on an ad hoc bilingual comparable corpus consisting of original travel insurance policies in Spanish and Italian. By means of this study we justify our selection and highlight the specific features of this kind of hybrid and legally-binding documents, which provide benefits if used as training materials in a specialised translation course. Thanks to these specific features, travel insurance policies provide students with suitable material to work on language and culture divergences and similarities in a cross-cultural environment and to practice different translation strategies in order to solve possible translation problems. By using this kind of material in a specialised translation course, the focus of translators-to-be could be shifted from differences to similarities. This would help trainees acknowledge that different realities designated by different languages are undergoing a progressive convergence due to the expansion of tourism as an increasingly transcultural market sector and would enhance their self-perception of their role as transculturally-aware communication specialists.