TouriTerm: A multilingual database for the translation and production of quality tourist texts. TouriTerm: Eine mehrsprachige Datenbank für die qualitative Erstellung und Übersetzung von Tourismustexten.

For foreign tourists visiting Italy, it is not uncommon to find tourist information which is far from being well-written and/or well-translated. This is often due to the lack of cultural and linguistic competence of those in charge of tourist promotion. For countries relying on international incoming like Italy, the development of information-retrieval tools specifically designed to enhance the idiomatic quality of multilingual tourist texts has thus become a crucial issue. Given the difficulty to capture the variety of text types and conventions within tourist discourse, a focus on a particular instantiation of tourist communication is a key requirement for creating such a reference tool. The paper reports on the state of the art of a joint research project developed by the Centro Studi sul Turismo (Catholic University of Brescia) and the Zentrum für Translationswissenschaft (University of Vienna). The project consists in the development of a multilingual terminological and textual database (supported by SDL MultiTerm Server), to be used as a resource for LSP teaching and as a reference tool to improve the quality of promotional tourist texts and their translations, both in academic and professional contexts. The corpus consists of Italian texts on the city of Brescia and its province, produced and distributed by the local tourist authorities, as well as parallel texts (at first in German) about destinations with similar characteristics to Brescia. The paper illustrates the different phases of the project (i.e. data collection, corpus design and analysis, data input) and describes the database architecture. Particular attention is devoted to the results of the initial stage, that is the creation and description of the Italian corpus as well as the early phase of data extraction and input. Emphasis is placed on the distinguishing peculiarity of the termbank, namely the integration of rich phraseological, textual and pragmatic information (e.g. recurrent collocations, communicative functions, usage notes, co-textual setting, and so on.).