Translation of cultural references in Spanish rural hospitality industry

Our study aims to investigate the treatment of culturemes in the context of rural tourism from a contrastive perspective (Spanish-English). Data were obtained from an ad hoc parallel corpus comprising texts from rural tourism accommodations in the autonomous region of Castile and Leon (Spain) and their English translations. We analyzed and categorized cultural references related to rural tourism buildings and examined the translation techniques employed. The results indicate that 69.7% of the equivalences used in the target texts are adequate, with direct translation (69.3%) being the most common method, followed by generalization (15.8%). Regarding adequacy percentages, direct translation is the most effectively used technique (90.6%), while generalization exhibits the highest rate of inadequacy (76.5%). Given the abundance of cultural references in the analyzed texts, parallel corpora prove to be valuable tools for identifying commonly used terminology and phraseology in a language, thus helping to avoid culture-bound mistakes.