Knowledge dissemination through tourist guidebooks: Popularization strategies in English and Italian guidebooks for adults and for children

The article investigates the discourse of guidebooks in terms of popularization, that is, in terms of the ways in which specialised and culture-specific concepts are reconceptualised and recontextualised to meet the needs, tastes and background encyclopaedia of the ideal reader. English and Italian guidebooks for adults and for children were analysed in order to compare the communicative strategies used in the two languages and in materials meant for different age groups. Whereas guidebooks for adults are a well established genre in both lingua-cultural systems, guidebooks for children are a relatively new subgenre in the Italian market and the first popular instances were, in fact, translations of English guidebooks for young travellers. Some noticeable differences were found cross-linguistically in guidebooks for adults. Such differences are significantly levelled out in guidebooks for children, which display a tendency towards simplification and informality in both languages. However, some of the distinctive features of the genre in Italian are preserved. For this reason, the last part of the article focuses on the impact of translation on the popularization strategies identified in guidebooks for children.