Members

Founding members

Sofia Malamatidou

Sofia Malamatidou is Associate Professor in Translation Studies at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on the interdisciplinary study of cross-cultural communication, with a particular interest in tourism communication. She is the author of Translating Tourism: Cross-Linguistic Differences of Alternative Worldviews (2024), which draws on a 2-million-word multilingual corpus to examine how tourism promotional language is adapted across cultures, and has published widely on the topic of tourism translation in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. Her work integrates translation studies, tourism studies, and cross-cultural communication, contributing to both theoretical and applied understandings of how language shapes tourist experiences. 

Elena Manca is Associate Professor of English Linguistics, Language and Translation at the University of Salento (Lecce – Italy). Her research focuses on translation studies, cross-cultural studies, corpus linguistics, and specialised languages, and she has extensively investigated the linguistic, visual and cultural features of tourism discourse by comparing multimodal tourist texts in English and in Italian. She is currently working on the lexico-grammatical and syntactic features of social media language used to promote tourism destinations. 

José María Castellano Martínez

José María Castellano Martínez is Associate Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Córdoba, specialising in Translatology and Tourism Translation, with a focus on multilingual tourist destination image analysis. He is the author of Conceptual and Translation Foundations for Translating Promotional Tourist Texts (2021), and he has co-led the Eno-Ándalus R&D project (2022), mapping Andalusian identity through wine tourism. Currently, he directs Subbética by Tourscope, a knowledge-transfer project analysing the multilingual tourist image of this region. He also affiliated with the Chair of Heritage and Cultural Tourism and the Andalusian Institute for Research and Innovation in Tourism (IATUR).

Gloria Cappelli

Gloria Cappelli is Associate Professor of English Linguistics and Translation at the University of Pisa. Her research explores the intersection of language, cognition, and culture, with a primary focus on how linguistic and pragmatic strategies shape the tourist experience and how culture-specific meanings are negotiated in English and Italian promotional tourism communication. She is the author of Sun, Sea, Sex and the Unspoilt Countryside. How the English Language Makes Tourists out of Readers (2023, second edition) and has published on the translation and localisation of online tourism content, humour, code-switching, linguistic creativity, and popularisation strategies in guidebooks and blogs, as well as on the features of spoken tourism discourse. Her work also includes studies on conceptual accessibility in tourism communication and on the teaching of English for tourism.