Moorheilbäder für Italiener. Ein linguistischer Fall

Professional translations are vital for hotels that run websites to offer their services to international tourists. This paper deals with a case study on medical wellness and mud baths as offered by a hotel located in Upper Bavaria (Germany). It highlights the difficulties in the translation of a German website text into Italian, tracing a lexical and stylistic journey through a comparative textual analysis. The examples given show the importance of taking into account textual customs and the difficulty in finding a balance between different types of requirements, due to the hybrid nature of the source and target texts that pertain to at least three specialized languages: tourism, medicine and advertising. The task can best be fulfilled by combining computer-based corpora research with cross-cultural considerations, paying particular attention to lexical choices and stylistic features as means used to sell services while conveying values and lifestyles.