Fachsprache(n) im Tourismus

Tourism is one of the most important economic factors worldwide and offers a wide range of occupation opportunities, from travel planning (e.g. travel agencies, tour operators), transport (e.g. bus companies), to accommodation, food and beverage as well as activities at the destination (tourist information centres, tourist guides, entertainers etc.). As such, tourism is without doubt a very complex communication sector, and requires, on the part of its actors, very different factual, linguistic, technical, and (inter-cultural) communication competences. Even though communication in tourism shows distinctive and describable features, specialised language and discourse scholars do not agree about its status in this field. In this context, this article aims on the one hand to contribute to possible descriptions of the communication sector of tourism within the framework of specialised discourse, and on the other hand to describe a proposal of how the communication between experts and non-experts can be integrated in University linguistics and translation courses in Italy with German as a Foreign Language, thus focussing on typical tourism text genres aimed at (potential) tourists.