Wine and translation: an analysis of phraseological units in English and Spanish wine technical sheets

ABSTRACTThe language used to market and describe wine is characterised by the subjectivity and creativity of the terms used. This makes the encoding and decoding of oenology-related texts a demanding task. As genres in this field are persuasive in nature, the correct translation of wine-related terminology is crucial to sell the product. In wine-related genres, phraseological units have been understudied especially with regards to translation. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the use of phraseological units in one of the most representative genres in the field, i.e. wine technical sheets, with a view to assisting translators in the comprehension and management of oenology-related texts. A contrastive analysis was carried out using an English-Spanish comparable corpus in order to identify and classify phraseological units according to their function and semantic characteristics; further analysis of the distribution of these units allowed us to define the rhetorical structure of wine technical sheets. The study evidenced the high frequency and complexity of phraseological units in the genre.KEYWORDS: Specialised phraseologyoenologycomparable corporatranslation Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 The concept of genre refers to a specific set of communicative purposes used by discourse communities (Bhatia, Citation2004, p. 23) which impose constraints at micro and macro linguistic levels. For a comprehensive classification of text genres in the field of wine cf. Ramírez Almansa (Citation2021).2 The term ‘amateur’ in wine tasting was coined by Robinson (Citation2015) to describe laypeople or beginners in the world of wine.3 http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/usas/ USAS groups together words according to a set of tags with three level of hierarchical semantic fields using the alphabet and a decimal system. Although it was originally developed for general language, in the present study the tags were adjusted to fit the LSP language of oenology.4 https://actres.unileon.es/wordpress/?lang=enAdditional informationFundingThis work was supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (Spain) under Grant PID2020-114064RB-I00 as part of the research project Lenguajes naturales controlados, comunicación colaborativa y producción textual bilingüe en entornos 3.0; the corresponding author was also supported by the European Union – NextGenerationEU via Ministerio de Universidades (Spain) and Universidad de Valladolid (Spain) under Grant Programa Recualificación del Profesorado Universitario.Notes on contributorsLeticia Moreno-PérezLeticia Moreno-Pérez holds a PhD in Professional and Institutional Translation from Universidad de Valladolid (Spain), where she has lectured topics such as English for Specific Purposes or specialised translation since 2010. Her research focuses on specialised language and its translation from a functional approach through corpus-based studies, specifically in the field of legal and business translation. She has published and presented at international conferences on this area, and she is a member of the international research group ACTRES (Contrastive Analysis and Translation English-Spanish in its Spanish acronym), also specialised in the field. She has combined her academic work with professional translation and language training in the business sector for 10 years.Belén López-ArroyoBelén López-Arroyo is an Associate Professor in ESP at the University of Valladolid (Spain). She taught legal and business translation in the School of Translation and Interpreting from 1997 to June 2013 and she currently teaches legal and business translation and Corpus Linguistics in the English Studies Degree. Her research interests include Discourse Analysis, Genre Analysis, Lexicography and Terminology, Contrastive Analysis and Translation. She is author of several articles and books related to contrastive analysis of scientific and professional genres and its implications for translation. In the ACTRES team she is in charge of the Rhetoric and Phraseology of Expert-to-Expert Discourse (in different areas) and its applications for developing writing aids in English for Spaniards.