Political language and tourist language: a contrastive analysis of Spanish and Italian

Abstract

This article highlights the role of contrastive linguistics, both in didactics and in translation, when comparing two languages that have always been considered similar, even if it is a deceptive resemblance. More specifically, in this work contrastive analysis will be applied to correctly identify problems of equivalence between Spanish and Italian political and tourist languages. First of all, in the introduction, the aim is to find out what is defined by the term "specialised language" in order to evaluate  whether the two languages under study can be included in such a designation. A study corpus is also identified and then it is mentioned the method to be used: a careful contrastive analysis to measure the symmetries and dissymmetries between the two codes. In the second section, the characteristics of both language are examined in depth, and in the third section, focal point of the work, a cross-study of the two languages is undertaken, especially of the so-called "deceptive cognates", the "culture-bound” and altered words, the "catch-all terms", and, at the same time, it is also clarified the nature of free and non-free combinations of words.