Welcoming children, pets and guests: towards functional equivalence in the languages of 'agriturismo' and 'farmhouse holidays'

Abstract

This paper takes a contextual and functional view of translation equivalence; it aims to define a ‘wider’ notion of equivalence built on a network of collocates rather than on single items. Thus, given an initial ‘node’ N in L1, the identification of a translation equivalent in L2 will proceed through several stages of contextualisation relating each item to its environment and identifying its collocational profile both in L1 and in L2. Furthermore, it will be shown that systematic enlargement of the unit of meaning in terms of patterns of co-occurrence helps to define a typology of the extra-linguistic features associated with it.