The Third Language in English Guidebooks and its Translation into Spanish

This article focuses on a specific feature found in tourist guidebooks –the recurrent use of foreign expressions or “third language”. It presents the findings of a comparative analysis of a parallel corpus made up of twenty guidebooks: ten guidebooks originally written in English and their corresponding translated versions in Spanish, describing different countries and cities (all of them published by Lonely Planet), focusing on those chapters in which the writer includes practical information. The purpose of the study is to analyze the use of the third language in the English and Spanish versions and to determine and identify the translation strategies used by the translators to transfer these linguistic elements from one language to the other. To this aim, a classification of transference strategies is presented, as well as a brief review of the most influential authors who have contributed to this field of study. The results will show the translation tendency regarding the translation of foreign expressions. DOI: 10.1400/22969