As a new field of translation with its own special genre, geotourism has not yet been firmly established because geotourism translations are currently not of a sufficient professional standard. This situation does not provide geotourists with the genre’s full target of enjoyment, learning and engagement through science popularisation tourism activities. In order to better meet these three definitive purposes in geotourism, this study analyses the three basic categories of geotourism—geological features (GFs), geological processes (GPs) and cultural elements (CEs)—to determine effective strategies of geotourism translation from Chinese into English. Challenges in translation include scientific jargon, language style and cultural gaps. In this article, the advantages of Hu’s Eco-translatology theory are explained and used for minimising translation problems; and the corpus linguistics method, superior for quantitative and qualitative analysis, is utilised. As well, digital auxiliary tools Tmxmall (2014) and Sketch Engine (2003) were employed to facilitate corpus research. Through analysis, effective strategies in each of the key geotourism categories, GFs, GPs and CEs, were identified, shaped and recommended for future translators’ attention. In the results, literal translation, transliteration and free translation, addition and use of official UNESCO names were recommended to render GFs. Division and shift translation, literal translation and shift and division were recommended for GPs. Literal translation, transliteration and free translation and addition were recommended for CEs. Since this is an initial investigation in the genre of geotourism, this study has attempted to build a model platform for future study and wider research in geotourism translation and translation pedagogy for the improvement of geotourism translation quality.
Grammatical gender as a lexico-syntactic feature has been well explored, and the gender congruency effect has been observed in many languages (e.g., Dutch, German, Croatian, Czech, etc.). Yet, so far, this effect has not been found in Romance languages such as Italian, French, and Spanish. It has been argued that the absence of the effect in Romance languages is due the fact that the gender-marking definite article is not exclusively dependent on the grammatical gender of the head noun, but also on its onset phonology (e.g., lo zucchero is ‘the sugar’ in Italian, not il zucchero, il being the default masculine determiner in Italian). For Spanish, this argument has also been made because feminine words starting with a stressed /a/ take the masculine article (e.g., el água is ‘the water’, not la água). However, the number of words belonging to that set is rather small in Spanish, and it may be questionable whether or not this feature can be taken as an argument for the absence of a gender congruency effect in Spanish. In this study, we investigated the gender congruency effect in native Spanish noun phrase production. We measured 30 native Spanish speakers’ naming latencies in four conditions via the picture–word interference paradigm by manipulating gender congruency (i.e., gender-congruent vs. gender-incongruent) and semantic relatedness (i.e., semantically related vs. semantically unrelated). The results revealed significantly longer naming latencies in gender-incongruent and semantically related conditions compared to gender-congruent and semantically unrelated conditions. This result suggests that grammatical gender as a lexico-syntactic feature in Spanish is used to competitively select determiners in native Spanish speakers’ noun phrases. Our findings provide an important behavioral piece of evidence for the gender congruency effect in Romance languages.
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