Our aim is to give an account of the process carried out in the compilation of a multilingual lexicon of rural tourism terms. This lexicon provides equivalents of Spanish local culturally-loaded terms in English, French and Portuguese, the languages spoken by the vast majority of visitors to Castile and Leon. This tool will contribute to improve the communication in the catering industry in this region and will prove to be a user-friendly and time-saving device. More specifically, we have created this terminographic tool as a contribution to: (i) the understanding and fruitful communication between foreign visitors and local workforce; (ii) the specific language needs of this workforce involved in facilitating a pleasant stay to foreign travelers; (iii) the learning of the uses, needs and preferences of tourists; (iv) the avoidance of pitfalls in written texts - web pages, menus, letters, brochures, etc. Our lexicon consists of over 4,600 terms in Spanish and their equivalents in English, French and Portuguese. One way to overcome this difficulty is to provide catering personnel with a means to easily and quickly check up difficult terms not easy to find in a traditional dictionary.
There are several studies devoted to analyzing
the terminology used in rural tourism in Spanish
The languages included in our lexicon are
Spanish, English, French and Portuguese, since these
are the languages spoken by the majority of
visitors to Castile and Leon
Rural tourism is the kind of tourism that takes place in the countryside, and is based on local resources. It includes a wide array of tourism activities and services in rural destinations, where the different businesses operating there are often owned and managed by local entrepreneurs and their families; typically they offer smallscale accommodation, homemade cuisine and close contact with nature and the host community.
Rural tourism involves the direct contact with the culture of the area –its folklore, customs, gastronomy, etc. - and therefore, the language of tourism serves as a link between the visitors and the place they are visiting together with its culture (Durán Muñoz, 2008:31).
One significant characteristic of rural tourism is
its intimate connection with ethnography,
heritage, art and architecture, history and rural life.
Thus, the consequence of the promotion of these
destinations has been the revival of former
methods of production and ways of living, which
favor the re-use of terms in many cases obsolete
and/or outdated. But it is also very closely linked
with other areas of study, such as marketing,
economics, public relations, geography and
landscaping, etc. It is due to this varied mixture of
disciplines that linguists play a basic and
fundamental role in the supervision of the correct use
of language in rural tourism communicative
situations. Our interest in this work is from a
lexicographic perspective and it should be noted
that the emergence of rural tourism in the past
few years worldwide but also in Castile and
Leon, has contributed to the widening of the
“repertoire of this specialized language”
Our multilingual lexicon is the result of a team project that includes university professors from different Linguistics and Translation departments of Portuguese, French and English languages from the University of Valladolid (Spain) and Universidad do Minho (Portugal).
To build our lexicon we have first compiled a monolingual electronic corpus of Spanish online rural tourism websites and pdf documents referring to Castile and Leon tourism. The corpus consisted of 350 texts in Spanish (50,000 words). For the extraction of the Spanish candidate terms we used a word list generated by AntConc, which is a free online corpus analysis tool. Once extracted, a selection of these terms was made, discarding those that were not appropriate for our purposes. The selected Spanish terms were classified and a conceptual tree was built using tags designating different subfields of the domain of rural tourism -art, artistic activities, architecture, churches and convents, castles and fortifications, handicraft, popular celebrations, typical dishes, businesses and so on-. To be included in this lexicon these subdomains had to directly apply to an issue relevant to Castile and Leon rural tourism. Once the Spanish terms were assigned to the different subfields, the experts had to conduct a research in order to find appropriate equivalents for these often very culturally-loaded Spanish terms in the target languages. When no equivalent term was found, these specialists had to elaborate a concise and precise definition explaining the entry term.
The final product is a lexicon consisting of more than 4,600 terms in Spanish and their equivalents in English, French and Portuguese. This lexicographic tool is in the process of being published as a printed terminographic resource and also as an online source. The reason for these two versions is that, due to the specific orographical characteristics of the region of Castile and León, it is very difficult to access the Internet in various locations due to technical problems; therefore, a hard copy version of the lexicon would be the most appropriate solution. On the other hand, an online version of the lexicon will allow the authors to constantly update it with new terms. Also this terminology tool will easily be accessed through app devices. 4.
The lexicon compiled contains terms dealing
with different subfields of rural tourism. While
finding appropriate equivalents for the terms, we
had to face various terminology and translation
issues. Often we had great difficulty when there
was a lack of equivalent in the target language
due to referential opacity or if there was one it
was either too general, inaccurate or confusing
(
muela (molino): millstone (En) meule (Fr) moinho (Pt)
(HANDICRAFT)
muela: molar, back tooth (En) molaire (Fr) molar (Pt)
(PARTS OF THE BODY)
crucero: transept (En) croisée du transept (Fr) transepto
(Pt) (CHURCHES AND CONVENTS)
crucero: stone cross (En) calvaire, croix dressée sur une
plate-forme ou à un carrefour (Fr)
cruzeiro (Pt) (TRADICTIONAL ARCHITECTURE)
talla (madera): carving (En) sculpture (Fr) talha (Pt)
(SCULPTURE)
talla: size (En) taille (Fr) tamanho (Pt) (CLOTHES AND
ACCESSORIES)
We also took into account the most relevant
collocations in the language of rural tourism in
Spanish while compiling our lexicon. A
collocation is a recurrent word combination consisting
of a base and one or more
The ultimate goal of our study has been to make a minor contribution to the communication between foreign visitors and local workforce in the rural catering industry. We have found that there were relevant issues that needed to be clarified when searching for the right equivalents in the target language – e.g. opacity, borrowings, lexicalization, polysemy, collocations and so on. We hope that our lexicographic tool will be of great help to those involved in the different areas of the rural tourism industry.
This paper has been written in the framework of the research projects: “Los idiomas al servicio del turismo rural de Castilla y León: Optimización de los métodos de captación, fidelización y atención al turismo de habla inglesa, portuguesa y francesa” (VA018A10-1), supported financially by the Junta de Castilla y León and “Léxico Combinatorio en Medicina: Cognición, Texto y Contexto (CombiMed)” (FFI2014-51899-R), supported financially by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.