Divided Loyalties? Some Notes on Translating University Websites into English

The translation of university texts into English, especially web-based texts, can be seen as a very particular case of "localization". In established models of “web localization”, mostly based on translation from English, localization is defined as the adaptation of the linguistic aspects of a product or service to a specific market characterized by a distinct social and cultural profile. However, when addressing an international audience through a lingua franca, as is often the case with institutional websites, there may be no proper target “locale” to speak of and identifying a “target” audience may turn out to be difficult. The paper gives a brief overview of what and how universities translate into English, with special reference to what happens in Italy, and then discusses the implications of translation into lingua-franca English for some fundamental notions employed by scholars and practitioners of translation and cross-cultural communication.