Comunicazione museale e traduzione: le audioguide del British Museum

Abstract The paper sets out to provide a linguistic and textual analysis of a corpus composed of transcripts of the two official audio guides of the British Museum, a traditional audio guide called “Galleries of the British Museum”, and an innovative multimedia guide available on a digital device. The paper examines two linguistic elements of the audio guides to locate the principal features of this text type, taking into account scientific literature and up-to-date guidelines. From lexical density, a parameter to analyse how informative the text is, to allocutive pronouns, a recurrent linguistic feature useful to evaluate the interaction with the museum listener/visitor. The criteria are subsequently examined from a linguistic-translation perspective to bring into view the strategies applied to translate them from the source text to the Italian target text. The British Museum offers two alternative tools conceived for different purposes: on the one hand, the traditional audio guide is an introduction to the galleries for visitors at home; on the other hand, the multimedia guide is an instrument to live an engaging experience inside the museum. Furthermore, the latter is an example of how the audio guide’s digital textuality has improved in recent years. Although audio guides still play a pivotal role in museum fruition today, further research must be carried out to analyse the interweaving between technology and linguistic accessibility in museum texts. Parole chiave: Audio guide, multimedia guide, museum communication, museum translation, accessibility, corpus.