Social media, promotion and translation

Abstract This study examines the language employed on the social media platform Facebook for promoting domestic tourist destinations, focusing on the Facebook pages managed by the tourism authorities of Italy, Britain, and the United States. The analysis delves into how content is structured within posts, the interactional linguistic features used to engage readers, and the overall communicative approach of the posts. To accomplish this, three corpora of Facebook posts were compiled, covering the period from August 2022 to August 2023. These corpora were analysed following Hyland’s (2005) theoretical model of metadiscourse and using analytical methods commonly employed in corpus linguistics. A manual qualitative analysis was conducted to discern how content is organised in the posts across the three Facebook pages. The English translations available on the Italian Facebook page were also examined to ascertain whether, drawing from the insights obtained from the analysis of the Italian, British, and US pages, the posts were adapted for an international audience during the translation process. The results showed that each of the three tourism authorities pursues its persuasive aims differently, trying to attract potential visitors with varying levels of interaction.