Exploring Expo Milano 2015: a cross-linguistic comparison of food-related phraseology in translation using a comparallel corpus approach

This article compares the food-related phraseology used in the official online descriptions in English and Italian of the 116 national pavilions at the universal exhibition Expo Milano 2015, whose main theme was ‘Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life’. An innovative comparallel corpus methodology is adopted to investigate the bilingual phraseology celebrating the best culinary products and gastronomic traditions from all over the world; in spite of consisting of seemingly parallel texts, the pavilion descriptions in English and Italian are analysed as a comparable corpus: even though the corpus data were collected from corresponding localised versions of the Expo Milano 2015 website, a classic analysis of the English and Italian parallel texts was impracticable, because many of these descriptions were bound to be themselves translations from the official languages of the respective countries, resulting in a chaotic mix of language pairs and translation directions. The cross-linguistic phraseological comparison of the formal and functional features of the most frequent lexical items used to describe food cultures from across the world in the two languages shows that the English keywords tend to have a much broader and more diverse collocational range than their prima facie translation equivalents in Italian, which are subject to more severe co-selectional restrictions. This sheds light not only on how Expo Milano 2015 presented itself to the online global audience, but also, and more crucially, on how multilingual translated food-related phraseology shaped the perception of the key themes of this world-scale event across different linguistic and cultural communities.