The use of travel narratives to foster intercultural sensitivity and language awareness in the EAP classroom: the case of A House in Sicily by Daphne Phelps and its Italian translation Una Casa in Sicilia.

Abstract

This study argues for the use of English travel narratives and their interlingual translations as vehicles to foster intercultural sensitivity and language awareness in the EAP classroom. Both travel writing and interlingual translation have been, in fact, successfully used in academic environments as shown by an increasing scholarly interest over the past decades. Moreover, the relationship between travel and language can be explored, in Cronin’s words, “in the context of a nomadic theory of translation” where “the translating agent like the traveller straddles the borderline between the cultures” (Cronin, 2000, p. 2). In light of these considerations, this study performs a comparative analysis of Daphne Phelps’s British travel narrative A House in Sicily (1999) and its Italian translation Una casa in Sicilia (2001) to show how travel writing (also in translation) may be an excellent opportunity for a reappraisal of what literature may have to offer in the EAP context.

Keywords

• travel
• writing
• translation
• phelps
• eap