Proper Names in German > Spanish Tourist Translation

Works devoted exclusively to proper names in tourist translation are still very scarce. However, Both the average tourist and the specialised writer could agree that names are one of the key vehicles of the “double appellation” strategy attributed to tourist discourse by Nobbs (1996): inform and excite in order to attract the visitor to a destination. This study compiled a German > Spanish comparable corpus from the official website of the Baden-Württemberg Tourism Department, on which manual Named Entity Recognition (NER) and annotation were performed. Onomastic data were later regrouped automatically using Excel and categorised according to their (non-)mediation schemes: translation, blending, borrowing, and further combinations. Results yielded that LOC (Location) and MISC (Miscellaneous) entities are the most frequent in both languages, but general numbers drop dramatically in Spanish (254 annotated named entities against 901 in the German corpus). The combined use of names with paralinguistic signs such as brackets and inverted commas is also quantified and discussed cross-linguistically.