Translating English toponymic generics in Italian travel guides

Guidebooks are among the tools travellers most commonly rely on before and during a vacation trip. As such, they influence their perception and representation of a destination and create paths across cultures and traditions. Moreover, being tourism one of the largest industries in the world, most tourism texts – in their printed, au- dio-visual and digital forms – are in English and are often translated into other languages, which is ultimately a form of cultural and linguistic exchange that stems from the movement of people and ideas. This paper intends to demonstrate how translating place names is a cultural and lin- guistic process that contributes to the hybridisation of tourism discourse through the coexistence of two languages in the same toponym. As the data analysed for this case study suggest, however, there are no shared strategies adopted by translators. As a matter of fact, even within the same text, toponymic generics are translated in different ways, which may be due to the textual fluidity of contemporary tourism discourse.