“Investigating Italian Wine & Food Tourism Websites: Are They Really Palatable for English-Speaking Tourists?”

Since 1950s, tourism has increasingly become a significant dimension of our “leisure civilization” (Dumazedier 1962) and globalization, as democracy and the speed of the technological evolution have been turning it into a mass phenomenon. Furthermore, the new tourists’ approach and demand have led to the creation of products targeted toward specific market segments (ranging, for instance, from spa/wellness tourism to film-induced tourism), though travellers may clearly engage in variety of overlapping activities. In this new large arena of travel tourism, food and wine – combined with art, culture, history and beautiful landscapes –are among the main reasons why millions of travellers visit Italy each year. Italy has in fact become one of the undisputed leaders of the so-called wine and food (W&F) tourism and 2018 has been named ‘The Year of Italian Food’. The Italian W&F tourism has particularly been enhanced by online advertising which nowadays has become of vital importance in tourism discourse (Manca and Bianchi 2013; Manca 2016) with its wide variety of discursive strategies (Maci 2012). From a broad MCDA perspective (Kress 2010; van Leeuwen 2013), our study aims at investigating to what extent, (some of) the most popular websites devoted to food and W& F tourism (http://www.turismoffida.com/en/turismo-enogastronomico.html;https://www.winewordswisdom.com/wineresources.htmlism; https://www.findyouritaly.com/;http://larosaworks.com/ ;http://www.italianwinetours.com/) are effectively accessible in their English version to ‘outsider’ tourists and if the interaction between the images and verbal texts is always entirely dynamic and effective. In these websites the most common lines of appeal (Dyer 1988) consist in (are displayed thorough) iconic images and historical-cultural features mainly meant to convey the underlying promotional message that the local flavor of a place can/must be experienced not only by sightseeing places, but by tasting a plate and through visits to local food producers. The food system possibly remains «the most sensitive and important expression of national culture» (Newmark 1988, p. 97), and still functions as an extraordinary vehicle of self-representation and cultural exchange (Montanari 2004). «Cooking […] is with language a truly universal form of human activity: if there is no society without a language, nor is there any which does not cook in some manner at least some of its food» (Lévi-Strauss 1997, p. 28). Food is a cultural phenomenon whose elements are interconnected and influenced not only by past traditions, but also by the blending of internal and external occurrences. On the one hand this makes food itself comparable to «an ensemble of texts» (Geertz 1973, p.24), while, from the other hand, the act of text translation becomes comparable with « the preparation of a dish» (Chiaro and Rossato 2015, p. 238). Particularly today, food meanings cannot be attributed once-and- for-all, but they can/must be continually interpreted/construed and are often (re)negotiated within the vastly increased daily interactions of the global flows of information, goods, individuals/groups. In fact, if «translation is a battlefield of many opposing strategies and views» (Paloposki and Oittinen 2000, p.375), above all «food terms are subject to the widest variety of translation procedures» (Newmark 1988, p. 97). Our study, drawing on the works of well-known translation scholars (Katan 2004, Newmark 1988, Taylor 2003), analyses different translation strategies chosen to render mainly food-related terms. We aim to highlight that though denotative domesticated messages can easily get across, and historical/cultural nuances often undergo a “chunking up” process (Katan 2004, p. 147), or mostly disappear. Discussion will consider more palatable – and possibly more attracting – translation options.