Necrotourism texts: characterization and challenges for its translation (French-Spanish)

Abstract

Necrotourism is a little-studied area from tourismology, linguistics, terminology and translatology. In fact, tourists’ lack of knowledge about this type of tourism is reflected in a limited number of researches, often very locally conducted. It has also led to a lack of data or surveys at national or regional level. This paper aims to complement the studies already undertaken in tourismology, carrying out a discursive analysis of the necrotourist texts in French and Spanish. Therefore, a textual corpus in both languages, composed of tourist guides, brochures and websites will be compiled. In this way, we will study the lexical-semantic, morphosyntactic and pragmatic-cultural characteristics of these texts, in order to facilitate their translation. This preliminary research concludes that there is not a necrotourist discourse as such, but a particular tourist discourse, characterized by a great interdisciplinarity and by the numerous semantic fields that nourish its lexicon, such as architecture and history of art. It has been also observed that this discourse is very influenced by culture, since each society has a particular relationship with death and places of burial.