From the classroom to the winery: translating Italian wine culture for international tourists

The wine sector is one of the areas of excellence in the Italian agri-food sector and Italy plays a leading role in terms of both production and exports. The importance of the sector for the Italian economy requires an effective marketing strategy, which has to be applied to wine as a specific product. In fact, wine is a product with a strong territorial connotation and consumers associate the quality of the product with the quality of the territory which produces it. For this reason, food and wine tourism, increasingly widespread in Italy as well as in other countries, aims to enhance the traditions and culture of the places where wine is produced. In this context, tourism promotional communication plays a fundamental role as it has to “translate” the character of a unique territory and the specific cultural background of the wine-making process. Effective communication is a fundamental instrument to make Italian small and medium-sized companies competitive in an era characterised by globalisation. The paper describes a didactic experiment in which postgraduate students enrolled in a Degree Course in Modern Languages have been challenged with the task of revising a published promotional text about the wine sector, and have shown considerable translating competence as well as a fair amount of creativity.